Athena is not BigQuery. Athena is just a fancy wrapper around Hive (you can see this right from the log output) and just runs map reduce over your S3 data. It's a great tool for what it is.
BigQuery is a full database. It is significantly faster than running anything from Athena. The closest comparison on AWS is Redshift.
BigQuery is a full database. It is significantly faster than running anything from Athena. The closest comparison on AWS is Redshift.