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AWS Guides & Tutorials
AWS for data engineers — S3, EC2, Lambda, Glue, Redshift, Athena, EMR and the certification roadmap that gets you hired.
AWS articles
Athena Federated Queries Explained
Athena Federated Query lets one SQL statement read from sources outside S3, such as DynamoDB, MySQL or Redshift, and join them with data lake tables. This guide explains connectors, predicate pushdown, passthrough queries, the documented limits, how billing works, and when copying the data is the better design.
Loading Data into Redshift: COPY and Best Practices
A practical guide to loading Amazon Redshift with the COPY command: why it beats INSERT, how file layout decides whether the load runs in parallel, a worked split of a real 2.96-million-row file into eight even parts with a manifest, loading Parquet, merging updates through a staging table, and verifying the load.
Redshift vs Snowflake vs BigQuery: A Comparison
Redshift, Snowflake and BigQuery bill for different things: running time, data scanned, capacity-hours. Pricing pages make them hard to compare. This guide prices one realistic workload in each warehouse's own unit, from documented billing rules, and shows the single setting that dominates each bill.
Parquet and Partitioning for Cheaper Athena Queries
Athena bills by the bytes each query scans, so file format decides most of the bill. This guide measures a real 2,964,624-row taxi file as CSV, gzipped CSV and Parquet, shows how few bytes a two-column query needs in a columnar file, and gives the CTAS statement that converts a table, with the limits to know.
AWS Glue Data Catalog and Crawlers Explained
The Glue Data Catalog is the index of an AWS data lake, and crawlers are the usual way to fill it. This guide explains what the catalog stores, how a crawler classifies files and decides between tables and partitions, what three real files with drifting schemas show, and the settings that keep crawlers predictable.
Amazon EMR Explained: Big Data on AWS
Amazon EMR runs Spark, Hadoop, Hive and other big data frameworks on AWS. This guide explains primary, core and task nodes, why data belongs in S3 and not in the cluster's HDFS, how work is submitted as steps, transient versus long-running clusters, the Serverless and EKS options, and what decides the bill.