AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 475

A ride-sharing company stores historical service usage data as structured .csv data files in Amazon S3. A data analyst needs to perform SQL queries on this data.
A solutions architect must recommend a solution that optimizes cost-effectiveness for the queries.
Which solution meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon EMR cluster. Load the data. Perform the queries.
• B. Create an Amazon Redshift cluster. Import the data. Perform the queries.
• C. Create an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster. Import the data. Perform the queries.
• D. Create an Amazon Athena database. Associate the data in Amazon S3. Perform the queries.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that allows users to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL, charging only for the queries run, which makes it highly cost-effective for ad-hoc queries. In contrast, Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL require provisioning and maintaining running clusters, leading to significantly higher costs for idle resources.