Athena occasionally releases a new engine version to provide improved performance,
functionality, and code fixes. When a new engine version is available, Athena notifies you
through the Athena console and your AWS Health Dashboard
Engine versioning is configured per workgroup. You can use workgroups to control which query engine your queries use and whether to let Athena automatically upgrade your workgroups. The query engine that is in use is shown in the query editor, on the workgroup details page, and is available through the Athena APIs.
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By default, workgroups are configured to auto upgrade. When a workgroup is set to auto upgrade, Athena upgrades the workgroup for you unless it finds incompatibilities.
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If you configure a workgroup to use a given version, Athena will not change the version of the workgroup.
In both cases, Athena upgrades your workgroups when a version is no longer available. Athena
notifies you through AWS Health Dashboard
When you start using a new engine version, a small subset of queries may break due to incompatibilities. Breaking changes are announced when a new Athena version is released. You should use workgroups to test your queries in advance of the upgrade by creating a test workgroup that uses the new engine or by test upgrading an existing workgroup. For more information, see Test queries in advance of an engine version upgrade.
