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What file formats does Athena support?

🟢 Easy Conceptual Fresher level
1Times asked
Jul 2026Last seen
Jul 2026First seen

💡 Model Answer

Amazon Athena supports a variety of columnar and row‑based file formats. The most common are CSV, JSON, Parquet, ORC, and Avro. It also accepts plain text and XML. Athena can read compressed files in GZIP, Snappy, LZO, BZIP2, and ZSTD. Parquet, ORC, and Avro are preferred for analytics because they store schema and allow predicate pushdown, which reduces scan size and improves query performance. When choosing a format, consider the trade‑off between storage cost, query speed, and compatibility with downstream tools.

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