Querying across regions - Amazon Athena
Considerations and limitations

Querying across regions

Athena supports the ability to query Amazon S3 data in an AWS Region that is different from the Region in which you are using Athena. Querying across Regions can be an option when moving the data is not practical or permissible, or if you want to query data across multiple regions. Even if Athena is not available in a particular Region, data from that Region can be queried from another Region in which Athena is available.

To query data in a Region, your account must be enabled in that Region even if the Amazon S3 data does not belong to your account. For some regions such as US East (Ohio), your access to the Region is automatically enabled when your account is created. Other Regions require that your account be "opted-in" to the Region before you can use it. For a list of Regions that require opt-in, see Available regions in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances. For specific instructions about opting-in to a Region, see Managing AWS regions in the Amazon Web Services General Reference.

Considerations and limitations

  • Data access permissions – To successfully query Amazon S3 data from Athena across Regions, your account must have permissions to read the data. If the data that you want to query belongs to another account, the other account must grant you access to the Amazon S3 location that contains the data.

  • Data transfer charges – Amazon S3 data transfer charges apply for cross-region queries. Running a query can result in more data transferred than the size of the dataset. We recommend that you start by testing your queries on a subset of data and reviewing the costs in AWS Cost Explorer.

  • AWS Glue – You can use AWS Glue across Regions. Additional charges may apply for cross-region AWS Glue traffic. For more information, see Create cross-account and cross-region AWS Glue connections in the AWS Big Data Blog.

  • Amazon S3 encryption options – The SSE-S3 and SSE-KMS encryption options are supported for queries across Regions; CSE-KMS is not. For more information, see Supported Amazon S3 encryption options.

  • Federated queries – Using federated queries across AWS Regions is not supported.

  • China Regions – Cross-region queries are not supported in the China Regions.

Provided the above conditions are met, you can create an Athena table that points to the LOCATION value that you specify and query the data transparently. No special syntax is required. For information about creating Athena tables, see Creating tables in Athena.