Sounding 01 · The pipeline
From raw to ready
The classic lake shape, entirely serverless. An ingest job pages the source API into the
raw zone; one Athena CREATE TABLE AS SELECT statement then cleans, types, and rewrites it as
partitioned Snappy Parquet, registering the result in the Glue catalog. The dashboard below reads
aggregates the ETL precomputed, so rendering this page costs zero Athena.
Sounding 02 · The dashboard
The state of Colorado business
Rendered from aggregates the ETL precomputed into the analytics zone.
Sounding 03 · The depth chart
Where the water is deep
Businesses in Good Standing by ZIP, each plotted at its Census centroid. Bubble area is the count; where bubbles crowd and overlap the chart reads darker, the way soundings crowd a harbor. Drawn from the same precomputed analytics zone as the dashboard, so it costs zero Athena to render.
Sounding 04 · Drop a line
Find your boat in the lake
Type the first letters of any business name: yours, your employer's, one you're curious
about. The API binds your text to a ? placeholder as an Athena execution parameter, so it
never enters the SQL string. A name can surface from any decade, which makes this the anti-pruning
exhibit: every partition gets read, but Parquet hands over only the few columns named in the SELECT,
and the sweep of all 3.1 million rows still costs a fraction of a cent.
Sounding 05 · Live SQL
Run live SQL on the lake
These queries execute in Athena when you click, against the same 3.1M rows, inside a workgroup that enforces a per-query scan cutoff. The stats underneath are Athena's own numbers: what it scanned, how long the engine ran, and what the query cost at $5 per terabyte scanned. Results cache for a few hours, and live executions are capped per day (…).
Sounding 06 · Raw vs curated
The raw-vs-curated race
The whole argument for a curated zone in one click: the identical
GROUP BY status aggregation runs twice, once over the raw gzipped JSON and once over the
partitioned Parquet. Columnar beats row-text on every number Athena reports.
Sounding 07 · The time machine
The lake keeps its old charts
The fourth zone is an Apache Iceberg copy of the curated table: the
format that gives plain S3 files ACID transactions, snapshots, and schema evolution, with no warehouse
involved. Each ETL run rebuilds it and then repairs the record with one UPDATE: the most
common misspellings of three city names (a few thousand rows, from an
enumerated list, not a fuzzy match) get filed under their proper spelling. That leaves two snapshots,
and both stay queryable.
Sounding 08 · The rigging