A company stores time-series sensor data in Amazon S3. They need to query the data using SQL with minimal latency and no infrastructure management. Which service should they use?
Athena is serverless and directly queries S3 using SQL.
Why this answer
Amazon Athena is the correct choice because it is a serverless interactive query service that allows you to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL without any infrastructure to manage. It is optimized for querying structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data stored in S3, making it ideal for time-series sensor data with minimal latency requirements.
Exam trap
The trap here is that candidates often confuse Amazon Athena with Amazon Redshift Spectrum, but the question explicitly requires 'no infrastructure management,' which eliminates Redshift; also, Kinesis Data Analytics is mistakenly chosen by those who think it can query static S3 data, but it is strictly for real-time streams.
How to eliminate wrong answers
Option A is wrong because Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is designed for real-time stream processing using SQL or Apache Flink, not for querying static data already stored in S3; it requires a streaming data source and incurs ongoing processing costs. Option C is wrong because Amazon Redshift is a fully managed data warehouse that requires provisioning and managing clusters, which contradicts the 'no infrastructure management' requirement; it is also overkill for simple SQL queries on S3 data and incurs higher costs for idle compute. Option D is wrong because Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL key-value and document database, not designed for SQL queries on S3 data; it requires data to be loaded into tables and does not support direct querying of S3 objects.