Junior — Middle
When does Athena process requests directly via JSON, and when does JSON only define the data schema?
sobes.tech AI
Answer from AI
In Amazon Athena, JSON can be used in two ways:
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Direct querying of JSON — when data is stored in JSON format and Athena reads it directly, using built-in support for working with nested JSON structures.
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JSON as a data schema — when JSON is used to define the structure of a table (for example, via SerDe), and the data itself is stored in another format (such as Parquet or CSV). In this case, JSON only describes the schema and does not store the data.
The choice depends on the data storage format and performance requirements: direct JSON queries are convenient for unstructured data but may be less efficient than using a schema with optimized formats.