Amazon Athena
Use Amazon Athena as Decube's compute engine for AWS Glue data sources, enabling profiling, data preview, data quality monitors, and Iceberg table observability.
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Use Amazon Athena as Decube's compute engine for AWS Glue data sources, enabling profiling, data preview, data quality monitors, and Iceberg table observability.
Amazon Athena is supported in Decube as a compute engine paired with the AWS Glue. It is not a standalone catalog source — Athena works alongside Glue to execute queries against your S3-backed tables, unlocking data observability capabilities that Glue alone cannot provide.
AWS Glue serves as the metadata catalog: it holds your table schemas, column definitions, and data job lineage (including Iceberg tables). Decube connects to Glue to extract and display this structural metadata.
Athena is a serverless query engine that runs SQL against data stored in Amazon S3. Because Glue does not natively support query execution, Decube uses Athena to power profiling runs, sample data previews, and data quality monitors. When you enable Athena on a Glue connection, Decube routes compute operations through Athena while continuing to use Glue for all metadata and lineage.
Without Athena, a Glue connection provides metadata and lineage only. Enabling Athena unlocks:
Profiling — run data profiles on your Glue-catalogued tables from the Profiler tab
Data preview — view sample rows directly in the Catalog
Data quality monitors — set up and run all five monitor types:
Freshness
Volume
Field Health
Custom SQL
Schema Drift
Iceberg table support — profiling, data preview, and all data quality monitors on Iceberg tables (Athena is required to query Iceberg format)
Job Failure monitors are not supported on Glue sources regardless of whether Athena is enabled.
Athena is configured as part of the AWS Glue connector setup. You will need:
An S3 bucket to store Athena query results
An Athena Workgroup
Additional IAM policies attached to the Glue IAM user
Full setup instructions are in the Enable Athena for Data Observability section of the AWS Glue connector page.
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