Full bidirectional ETL
Sync in both directions between Athena and your systems.
AWS Athena
Polytomic connects AWS Athena to your databases, SaaS tools, and cloud storage for ETL and reverse ETL. Read your S3 data lake through Athena, and write results back as managed Iceberg tables so new datamarts appear in Glue without any pipeline code.
Optimized for scale
Efficient operations minimize Athena query costs.
Writes Iceberg tables
Destination syncs produce managed Iceberg tables backed by Parquet in S3.
Example workflows
Build Athena datamarts from Athena with custom SQL transformations
What you can sync
Move data between AWS Athena and your databases, SaaS tools, and cloud storage, reading through Athena and writing managed Iceberg tables back to your lake.
From AWS Athena
Catalog, database, and table selection
Arbitrary Athena SQL as a model source
Incremental reads bounded by a tracking column
Glue catalogs, databases, tables, and columns
An optimized path that reads Athena results straight from S3
To AWS Athena
Managed Iceberg tables in Parquet format
Glue databases and tables created automatically
One configurable Iceberg partition key
Replicate and rebuild write behavior
How it works
Connect Athena with a region and an S3 results bucket, and Polytomic can both read your lake and write back into it. Reads work by selecting a catalog table or writing your own Athena SQL, which makes building a datamart from data already in the lake a configuration step rather than a pipeline.
Writes are the interesting part. Records are staged in S3, registered as a temporary Glue table, then materialized through CTAS into a managed Iceberg table in Parquet, validated, and swapped into place. The result is a real table your team can query immediately.
- Connect with access keys or an assumed IAM role
- Select a catalog table, or supply your own Athena SQL
- Read incrementally using a monotonic tracking column
- Write results as managed Iceberg tables backed by Parquet
- Create and update Glue databases and tables automatically
- Monitor sync health, record volume, and failures from one interface
How to set up
Polytomic connects to Athena using an access key and secret, or by assuming an IAM role with an external ID. You supply the region and an existing S3 bucket and prefix, which serves both as Athena's query results location and as staging and final storage for destination writes.
How to get connected
- 1Create or choose an S3 bucket for Athena query results
- 2Decide between access keys and IAM role assumption
- 3In Polytomic, navigate to Connections, then Add Connection, then AWS Athena
- 4Enter the region, output bucket and prefix, and credentials
- 5For a role, copy the generated external ID into your trust policy
- 6Test the connection and click Save
See the documentation for full setup details.
Frequently asked questions
Why teams choose Polytomic
No engineering required
Set up and manage syncs without writing code.
Flexible data modeling
Use SQL to define exactly what data gets synced.
Handles scale automatically
Supports large datasets with incremental syncs and bulk APIs.
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