# Create databases and tables
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Amazon Athena supports a subset of data definition language (DDL) statements and ANSI SQL functions and operators to define and query external tables where data resides in Amazon Simple Storage Service. 

When you create a database and table in Athena, you describe the schema and the location of the data, making the data in the table ready for real-time querying. 

To improve query performance and reduce costs, we recommend that you partition your data and use open source columnar formats for storage in Amazon S3, such as [Apache parquet](https://parquet.apache.org) or [ORC](https://orc.apache.org/). 

**Topics**
+ [Create databases](creating-databases.md)
+ [Create tables](creating-tables.md)
+ [Name databases, tables, and columns](tables-databases-columns-names.md)
+ [Escape reserved keywords](reserved-words.md)