S3 Staging Directory The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Athena database driver requires a folder in the Amazon S3 system to write out files in order to support the Athena database connection. The S3 Staging Directory is the path to the S3 folder the driver should use for writing out files. The syntax of the S3 Staging Directory value should be the following: s3://bucket_name/folder_name/ Here is a real-world example: s3://logs.acme.com/cdn_logs/