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SAA-C03 Practice Question 58: Athena Query Logs in Place

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 6 · question 8 of 10

Analyticseasy

Application Load Balancer access logs accumulate in an S3 bucket at a few hundred gigabytes a month. Two analysts want to run ad hoc SQL queries against them perhaps three or four times a week to investigate traffic patterns. Nobody wants to operate a cluster, and the company wants to pay only for the analysis it actually runs.

Which solution fits best?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • A. Catalogue the logs in the AWS Glue Data Catalog and query them in place with Amazon Athena

Athena is an interactive query service that runs standard SQL directly against data sitting in S3. It is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to set up or manage, and you pay only for the queries you run, which for a handful of investigations a week is dramatically cheaper than anything that runs continuously. The Glue Data Catalog holds the table definition so the analysts query named tables rather than raw paths. No copy of the data is made.

Option B keeps a cluster running, and paying for it around the clock to serve a few queries a week is poor value. Redshift earns its cost on sustained, high-concurrency warehousing workloads, and it requires loading the data rather than querying it where it already is.

Option C is built for near-real-time search and observability over streaming data, with a domain that runs continuously. It answers "what is happening now" rather than "let me run some SQL over last quarter's logs", and it too runs on always-on infrastructure.

Option D is the most operational effort of the four, and it ends with hundreds of gigabytes a month loaded into a relational database that was never meant to be a log warehouse. It also adds a nightly batch delay for data that could simply be queried where it lies.

Reference: What is Amazon Athena?

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