Amazon Athena announces upgraded query engine

[Amazon Athena](/athena/) has upgraded its SQL query engine to include the latest features from the Trino open source project. Athena engine version 3 includes over 50 new SQL functions, 30 new features, and more than 90 query performance improvements. With today’s launch, Athena is also introducing a continuous integration approach to open source software management that will improve currency with the Trino and Presto projects so that you get faster access to community improvements, integrated and tuned within the Athena engine. Athena engine version 3 includes all the features of version 2 while bringing numerous enhancements, such as T-Digest functions that can be used to approximate rank-based statistics with high accuracy, new Geospatial functions to run optimized Geospatial queries, and new query syntaxes such as MATCH\_RECOGNIZE for identifying data patterns in applications such as fraud detection and sensor data analysis. With our simplified engine upgrade process, you can configure existing workgroups to be automatically upgraded to engine version 3 without requiring manual review or intervention. Start using the new Athena engine today by creating or configuring a workgroup and selecting the recommended “Athena Engine Version 3”. For more details about selecting engine versions, see [Changing Athena engine versions](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/engine-versions-changing.html). To learn more about the features of Athena engine version 3, see [Athena engine version 3 reference](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/engine-versions-reference.html#engine-versions-reference-0003) and [Upgrade to Athena engine version 3 to increase query performance and access more analytics features](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/upgrade-to-athena-engine-version-3-to-increase-query-performance-and-access-more-analytics-features/). Athena engine version 3 is available today in all regions supporting Athena except for AWS China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet and AWS China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD.