Learn why Amazon Athena is the best choice for querying CSV files stored in Amazon S3 to generate summary reports. Understand its advantages over other AWS services like S3 Select, Redshift, and EC2.
Table of Contents
Question
A company has been storing monthly reports in an Amazon S3 bucket. The company exports the report data to comma-separated value (.csv) files. A developer wants to write a simple query that can read all those files and generate a summary report.
A. Amazon S3 Select
B. Amazon Athena
C. Amazon Redshift
D. Amazon EC2
Answer
B. Amazon Athena
Explanation
Amazon Athena is the AWS service that the developer should use to write a simple query that can read all the .csv files stored in an Amazon S3 bucket and generate a summary report. Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that enables users to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.
Amazon Athena requires no setup or management of servers, and users only pay for the queries they run. Amazon Athena can handle multiple data formats, including .csv, and can integrate with other AWS services, such as Amazon QuickSight, for data visualization.
Amazon Athena is the correct choice for this scenario. It is a serverless interactive query service that allows you to analyze data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Here’s why Athena is the best fit for querying multiple CSV files in an S3 bucket and generating a summary report:
Key Features of Amazon Athena
- Serverless and Scalable: No infrastructure setup or management is required. Athena automatically scales to handle large datasets.
- Query Multiple Files: Unlike Amazon S3 Select, which can query only one object at a time, Athena can query across multiple files or paths within an S3 bucket, making it ideal for generating comprehensive reports.
- SQL-Based Queries: Athena supports ANSI SQL, enabling developers to write complex queries, including joins, aggregations, and filtering, directly on data stored in S3.
- Integration with BI Tools: Data queried using Athena can be easily integrated with business intelligence tools like Amazon QuickSight for visualization.
Why Not the Other Options?
A. Amazon S3 Select: While cost-efficient for retrieving specific data from a single object in an S3 bucket, it cannot query multiple files simultaneously. This limitation makes it unsuitable for generating summary reports across multiple CSV files49.
C. Amazon Redshift: Redshift is a fully managed data warehouse optimized for complex analytics on structured data. However, it requires loading data into the warehouse first, which adds complexity and cost compared to Athena’s direct querying of S3 data4.
D. Amazon EC2: EC2 would require setting up and maintaining compute instances as well as custom scripts or applications to process the CSV files. This approach is less efficient and incurs higher operational overhead compared to serverless solutions like Athena.
Use Case Alignment
Athena is purpose-built for scenarios like this one—querying large datasets stored in S3 (e.g., CSV files) and generating insights or reports without needing to move or preprocess the data.
For querying multiple CSV files in an S3 bucket and generating a summary report, Amazon Athena is the most efficient and cost-effective solution. It eliminates the need for infrastructure management while providing powerful SQL capabilities to analyze your data at scale.
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