Which service allows you to analyze data stored in Amazon S3 using SQL?

Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that enables users to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. It allows for the querying of large datasets without the need for complex data preparation, as it directly accesses raw data stored in S3. This makes it an excellent choice for quick, ad hoc querying of data formats such as CSV, JSON, Parquet, and others.

Athena efficiently integrates with the rest of the AWS ecosystem, making it simple to pull data from S3 and analyze it directly, providing users with the flexibility to run queries without needing to set up any infrastructure. Its pay-per-query pricing model also helps to keep costs manageable, as users only pay for the data scanned by their queries.

In this scenario, while Amazon Redshift is a powerful data warehouse service for SQL-based analytics, it requires data to be loaded into its environment from S3, which adds an extra layer of complexity. Amazon QuickSight is primarily a business analytics service focused on data visualization, not direct SQL querying of S3. Amazon EMR allows for big data processing, including the use of SQL with tools like Apache Hive or Presto, but it requires cluster management and more setup compared to the straightforward querying capability of Athena. Therefore, the most