Redshift Spectrum Vs Athena. Amazon Athena is similar to Redshift Spectrum though the two services typically address different needs. Spinning up Redshift clusters. However Redshift Spectrum tables do also support other storage formats ie. Athena supports it for both JSON and Parquet file formats while Redshift Spectrum only accepts flat data.
17112017 Can I Use Both Amazon Athena and Redshift Spectrum. However Redshift Spectrum tables do also support other storage formats ie. It was stated however at AWS Summit that Redshift Spectrum can be run without using Amazon Redshift. Amazon Redshift has a broader approval being mentioned in 270 company stacks. Redshift data warehouse only supports structured data at the node level. The basic functionality offered by Athena and Redshift Spectrum is similar.
Further Athena saves money with compressed data.
However Redshift Spectrum tables do also support other storage formats ie. Amazon Redshift Spectrum is a feature under Amazon Redshift which allows you to query files directly on Amazon S3 buckets. Another is the availability of GIS functions that Athena has and also lambdas which do come in handy sometimes. Athena is derived from Presto while Redshift uses Postgres as a foundation. A query in Athena and Spectrum generally has the same cost basis of 5 per terabyte scanned. It was so popular that Amazon released Athena in 2016 and then Redshift Spectrum to better address the infrequent analytics segment of the market.