What service allows you to analyze large datasets using SQL in an interactive manner?

Amazon Athena is designed specifically to analyze large datasets residing in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. It is an interactive query service that enables users to run ad-hoc queries on structured and semi-structured data without needing to set up or manage any infrastructure. With Athena, you can quickly get insights from your data and pay only for the queries you run, making it an efficient choice for data analysis tasks.

One of the key advantages of Athena is its serverless architecture, allowing users to execute SQL queries directly on data stored in S3, without the need for data loading or transformation into another database. This straightforward and cost-effective approach makes it particularly appealing for analytical tasks on large datasets.

In contrast, Amazon Aurora is a relational database service designed for transactions rather than large-scale analytics. Amazon Kinesis is focused on real-time data streaming and processing, and while it can handle large datasets, it does not use SQL in the same interactive query fashion as Athena. Amazon EMR, on the other hand, is a big data platform that allows for the processing and analysis of massive datasets using frameworks like Hadoop and Spark, but it typically requires more setup and management than the more straightforward, query-based approach offered by Athena.