What is Amazon Athena?

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service specifically designed for querying data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. It allows users to run complex queries on large datasets without the need for any infrastructure management, as it is serverless, meaning you do not need to provision or manage servers.

Athena works by allowing users to create tables that describe the data files stored in S3, and then use SQL queries to extract and analyze that data directly from S3. This capability provides a cost-effective and efficient way to analyze data without loading it into a database. Users are charged based on the amount of data scanned per query, making it economical for various data analysis tasks.

In contrast, a database service refers to a managed service for storing and managing data, while a reporting tool typically focuses on presenting data insights in a visual format. A machine learning service would be geared toward building and training machine learning models, which is distinct from the query functionality that Athena provides.