Using AWS Athena requires an AWS account. If you don't have one, you must create one. To do so, follow the instructions in the AWS set-up guide. While there is no free tier for AWS Athena, you should be able to run 2-3 small test queries (~10MB in size) to understand how the system works.

This tutorial walks you through using Amazon Athena to query data. You'll create a table based on sample data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service, query the table, and check the results of the query. The tutorial uses live resources, so you are charged for the queries that you run.

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. It is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to set up or manage, and you pay only for the queries you run.

To set up Amazon Athena, first log in to the AWS management console. Then, search for 'Athena' in the search box and navigate to the Athena page. On the Amazon Athena main page, click on 'Get Started' if it's your first time setting it up.