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CLF-C02 Practice Question 27: Query Data in S3

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 3 · question 7 of 10

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An analyst occasionally needs to run ad-hoc SQL queries against log files that are already stored in Amazon S3. The company does not want to load the data into another system, set up or manage any infrastructure, or pay anything when no queries are running. Which AWS service fits best?

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Answer:

C. Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service for analyzing data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. You point Athena at data in S3 and start running ad-hoc queries; it is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to set up or manage, and you pay only for the queries you run.

Option A, Amazon Redshift, is a data warehouse built for large-scale, recurring analytics; it is a strong choice when data is loaded and queried continuously, but it is more than an occasional analyst needs for files that already sit in S3. Option B, Amazon QuickSight (now branded Amazon Quick Sight), is a business intelligence service for building dashboards and visualizations; it connects to data sources such as Athena rather than acting as the SQL query engine over S3. Option D, AWS Glue, is a serverless data integration service used to discover, catalog, and transform data with ETL jobs; Athena can use the Glue Data Catalog, but Glue is not the tool for running ad-hoc SQL queries.

Reference: What is Amazon Athena?

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