DBS-C01 Multiple Select — 20 Questions

Question 1

A company is designing a database for an IoT application that ingests sensor data from thousands of devices. Each device sends a reading every minute. The data includes device_id, timestamp, temperature, humidity, and pressure. The application needs to store this data and support queries that retrieve all readings for a specific device within a time range. The company expects high write throughput and moderate read frequency. The data must be stored with high durability. Which TWO database designs are appropriate for this workload? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon DynamoDB with device_id as partition key and timestamp as sort key.. Option C is correct because DynamoDB's partition key (device_id) and sort key (timestamp) design allows efficient retrieval of all readings for a specific device within a time range using a Query operation with a KeyConditionExpression on the sort key. This schema supports high write throughput by distributing writes across partitions based on device_id, and DynamoDB's multi-AZ replication provides high durability.

Answer

Use Amazon DynamoDB with device_id as partition key and store all readings for a device as a list attribute in a single item, updating the list every minute.

Answer

Use Amazon S3 to store compressed JSON files per device per hour, and query using Amazon Athena.

Answer

Use Amazon RDS for MySQL with a single table and index on device_id and timestamp.

Question 2

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 2 TB and has a high number of small transactions. The company needs to minimize downtime during the migration. Which TWO strategies should be used together? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to perform a full load and ongoing replication.. AWS DMS with ongoing replication (CDC) is the correct choice because it allows a full load of the 2 TB database followed by continuous replication of changes, minimizing downtime by keeping the target RDS instance nearly synchronized with the source until cutover. This approach is specifically designed for large databases with high transaction volumes, as it reduces the final outage window to seconds or minutes.

Answer

Use Oracle Data Pump to export the database and import into RDS.

Answer

Set up a VPN connection between on-premises and AWS for direct database link.

Answer

Create a manual snapshot of the RDS instance during the migration.

Question 3

A company is running a production Amazon DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity. The table experiences occasional throttling during traffic spikes. The table's partition key is a timestamp, and the workload is write-heavy. The operations team needs to reduce throttling. Which THREE actions should the team take? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Add a random suffix to the partition key to distribute writes evenly.. Option A is correct because adding a random suffix to the timestamp partition key breaks the sequential write pattern, distributing writes evenly across all partitions. This prevents hot partitions, which are the root cause of throttling in a write-heavy workload with a monotonically increasing partition key.

Answer

Increase the read capacity units for the table.

Answer

Enable DynamoDB global tables to distribute write traffic.

Question 4

A company is migrating its on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database specialist needs to monitor the migration process and ensure data consistency. Which TWO AWS services should be used together to continuously monitor the replication lag and data integrity?

Accepted Answer

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS). AWS DMS is the correct service because it is specifically designed for database migrations and provides built-in monitoring of replication lag via the 'CDC latency' metric. Amazon CloudWatch is the correct complementary service because it collects and visualizes DMS metrics, including replication lag and task status, and can trigger alarms if data integrity or latency thresholds are breached.

Answer

Amazon RDS Performance Insights

Answer

AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT)

Answer

AWS Glue

Question 5

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The security team requires that all data be encrypted at rest using a customer-managed KMS key. Additionally, the database should be accessible only from a specific VPC. Which THREE steps should the database specialist take to meet these requirements? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Configure the security group for the RDS instance to allow inbound traffic only from the application security group.. Option A is correct because security groups act as a virtual firewall for RDS instances. By configuring the security group to allow inbound traffic only from the application security group, you restrict database access to specific application servers, meeting the requirement that the database be accessible only from a specific VPC.

Answer

Create a VPC endpoint for RDS and associate it with the DB instance.

Answer

Store the encryption key in Amazon S3 and configure RDS to use it.

Question 6

A company runs a production Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance. The database experiences intermittent high latency during peak hours. The company's monitoring shows that CPU utilization is below 40%, memory is adequate, and network throughput is normal. The DB instance uses General Purpose SSD (gp2) storage with 3,000 Provisioned IOPS. Which TWO actions should a database specialist take to diagnose and resolve the performance issue? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Check the Burst Balance metric in Amazon CloudWatch for the DB instance.. Option A is correct because gp2 storage uses a credit-based burst model, and the Burst Balance metric indicates the remaining I/O credits. If the burst balance is depleted, the instance is throttled to the baseline IOPS (3,000 for this size), causing high latency despite low CPU and adequate memory. Checking this metric directly identifies whether the storage is starved for I/O credits.

Answer

Change the storage type to Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) with 10,000 IOPS.

Answer

Increase the Read IOPS by modifying the instance to a larger instance class.

Answer

Review the SwapUsage metric for the DB instance to check for memory pressure.

Question 7

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The security team requires that all connections to the database be encrypted in transit. Which TWO steps should be taken to enforce this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Set the rds.force_ssl parameter to 1 in the DB parameter group.. Setting the rds.force_ssl parameter to 1 in the DB parameter group forces all connections to the Oracle RDS instance to use SSL/TLS encryption. This is the direct method to enforce encryption in transit for Amazon RDS for Oracle, as it rejects any non-SSL connections at the database level.

Answer

Enable Oracle native network encryption (NNE) in the sqlnet.ora file.

Answer

Use AWS Secrets Manager to store database credentials and enable Kerberos authentication.

Answer

Use AWS Direct Connect or a VPN to connect to the VPC.

Question 8

A company is running a critical application on Amazon DynamoDB. The table has a partition key of 'user_id' and a sort key of 'timestamp'. The application frequently queries for all items for a given user within a date range. The read capacity is often throttled during peak hours. Which THREE steps should the database specialist take to resolve the throttling?

Accepted Answer

Enable DynamoDB adaptive capacity to automatically adjust throughput. Option A is correct because DynamoDB adaptive capacity automatically manages throughput to accommodate uneven access patterns, such as when a single 'user_id' partition receives more reads than provisioned. It allows the table to absorb throttling by redistributing unused capacity from other partitions, which directly addresses the peak-hour throttling without manual intervention.

Answer

Change the partition key to 'timestamp' to improve read distribution

Answer

Decrease the provisioned write capacity units (WCU) to free up resources for reads

Question 9

A company is designing a multi-tenant SaaS application on Amazon Aurora MySQL. Each tenant has its own database, but some tenants are very large and generate high write traffic. The company wants to isolate tenant workloads to prevent a noisy neighbor from affecting other tenants. Which TWO design strategies should the database specialist recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use Aurora Serverless for tenants with variable workloads. Option A is correct because Aurora Serverless automatically scales compute capacity based on application demand, which is ideal for tenants with variable workloads. This prevents a noisy neighbor scenario by ensuring that a tenant's burst of write traffic does not consume shared resources that would degrade performance for other tenants.

Answer

Use a single Aurora cluster with read replicas for each tenant

Answer

Migrate all tenants to Amazon DynamoDB and use DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) for caching

Answer

Use Amazon RDS Proxy to pool connections and limit throughput per tenant

Question 10

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB for a shopping cart application. The table has a partition key of `user_id` and a sort key of `item_id`. The application performs frequent updates to the `quantity` attribute. The company notices that write requests are being throttled during peak hours. Which TWO actions would help reduce throttling? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Increase the provisioned write capacity for the table.. Option A is correct because increasing the provisioned write capacity directly raises the number of write capacity units (WCUs) available per second, allowing more write requests to succeed without being throttled. Since the application performs frequent updates to the `quantity` attribute, which consumes write capacity, adding more capacity alleviates throttling during peak hours.

Answer

Use conditional writes to prevent overwrites.

Answer

Enable DynamoDB Streams to process writes asynchronously.

Answer

Enable DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) for the table.

Question 11

A company is migrating an on-premises MongoDB database to Amazon DocumentDB. The database stores IoT sensor data with time-series characteristics. The application performs range queries on timestamp fields and updates recent documents frequently. Which THREE aspects of DocumentDB should the company consider to optimize performance for this workload? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Implement sharding to distribute write load across multiple instances.. Option B is correct because DocumentDB does not support native sharding like MongoDB; however, for workloads with high write throughput, you can distribute writes by using multiple DocumentDB instances and routing writes based on a shard key in the application layer. This helps avoid write bottlenecks on a single instance and scales write capacity horizontally.

Answer

Use global secondary indexes to speed up queries on the timestamp field.

Answer

Use a single large instance class to avoid sharding complexity.

Question 12

A company runs a customer relationship management (CRM) application on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The application has a table 'customers' with columns: id (primary key), name, email, signup_date, and status. The table has 10 million rows. The application frequently queries by email address. The company also needs to run analytical queries that aggregate customers by signup_date and status. The DBA notices that the index on email is heavily used and causes high write latency. The company wants to improve write performance without sacrificing read performance for email queries. Which THREE actions should the database specialist take? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Create a BRIN index on signup_date.. Option A is correct because a BRIN (Block Range INdex) index on signup_date is ideal for large tables where data is naturally ordered by insertion time. BRIN indexes are much smaller and have lower write overhead than B-tree indexes, making them suitable for analytical queries on signup_date without significantly impacting write performance.

Answer

Remove the index on email to reduce write latency.

Answer

Create a GIN index on email.

Question 13

A company is migrating a 1 TB Oracle database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL using AWS DMS. They need to ensure minimal downtime and data consistency. Which TWO actions should the company take?

Accepted Answer

Enable change data capture (CDC) on the source Oracle database. Option B is correct because enabling Change Data Capture (CDC) on the source Oracle database allows AWS DMS to capture ongoing changes after the full load, enabling a near-zero downtime migration by continuously replicating transactions to the target Aurora PostgreSQL. Option C is correct because enabling data validation on the DMS task ensures that the data migrated is consistent between the source and target, verifying that no data loss or corruption occurred during the migration process.

Answer

Increase the target Aurora storage to 2 TB to avoid storage issues

Answer

Disable foreign key constraints on the target during migration

Answer

Use AWS Schema Conversion Tool to convert the schema

Question 14

A company is migrating a 3 TB on-premises Oracle database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL using AWS DMS. The migration task is failing with an error indicating insufficient memory. Which TWO actions should the company take to resolve this issue? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Increase the instance class of the DMS replication instance.. Option C is correct because the 'insufficient memory' error during an AWS DMS migration indicates that the replication instance lacks the memory required to handle the data volume, transformation rules, or cache for large transactions. Increasing the instance class (e.g., from dms.c5.large to dms.c5.2xlarge) provides more memory and CPU, directly resolving the resource constraint.

Answer

Change the target database engine to Amazon RDS for MySQL.

Answer

Disable Multi-AZ on the DMS replication instance.

Answer

Use a smaller instance class for the DMS replication instance.

Question 15

A company is planning to migrate a 1 TB MySQL database from on-premises to Amazon RDS for MySQL. The migration must have minimal downtime and support ongoing replication. Which THREE steps should the company include in the migration plan? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Set up an AWS Direct Connect or VPN connection between on-premises and AWS.. Option A is correct because a stable, low-latency network connection (Direct Connect or VPN) is essential for AWS DMS to perform ongoing replication with minimal downtime. Without this, the replication can be interrupted by network issues, causing data loss or extended cutover windows.

Answer

Deploy an Amazon EC2 instance to act as a proxy for the DMS replication.

Answer

Install the AWS Schema Conversion Tool on the source server to convert the schema.

Question 16

A company is migrating a self-managed PostgreSQL database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. They want to use the pglogical extension for logical replication to minimize downtime. Which THREE prerequisites must be met before setting up pglogical?

Accepted Answer

Add pglogical to shared_preload_libraries and restart the source database. Option A is correct because pglogical must be loaded into the shared preload libraries on the source PostgreSQL instance so that it is available at server start. Without this, the extension cannot be installed or used. The database must be restarted after modifying shared_preload_libraries for the change to take effect.

Answer

Configure max_wal_senders to at least 10

Answer

Enable track_commit_timestamp on the source

Question 17

A company is using an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster. The company wants to implement a backup strategy that supports point-in-time recovery (PITR) with a recovery time objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a recovery point objective (RPO) of 5 minutes. Which TWO actions should the company take?

Accepted Answer

Configure automated backups with a retention period of at least 5 minutes beyond the current time.. Option A is correct because Aurora automated backups are continuous and incremental, and the retention period must be set to at least 1 day (not 5 minutes) to enable point-in-time recovery (PITR). However, the key insight is that automated backups are always enabled by default with a 1-day retention, and PITR can restore to any point within that retention window, supporting an RPO of 5 minutes as Aurora's backup process captures changes every 5 minutes. Option E is correct because Aurora Backtrack allows you to 'rewind' the cluster to a specific point in time without restoring from a backup, achieving an RTO of 15 minutes or less by directly moving the cluster to a previous state, provided Backtrack is enabled with a backtrack window of at least 5 minutes.

Answer

Create manual snapshots every 5 minutes.

Answer

Enable cross-Region replication for the cluster.

Answer

Enable parallel query for the cluster.

Question 18

A company is using Amazon ElastiCache for Redis to cache frequently accessed data from an RDS MySQL database. The cache hit ratio is currently 85%. The operations team notices that during traffic spikes, the cache eviction rate increases significantly, and the database CPU utilization spikes. The cache cluster uses a single r6g.large node. Which THREE actions should the team take to improve performance? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Add more shards to the cluster to increase total memory.. Option A is correct because adding more shards to the cluster increases the total available memory, which reduces the frequency of evictions during traffic spikes. With more memory, the cache can store more data without forcing out existing entries, thereby maintaining a higher cache hit ratio and reducing the load on the RDS MySQL database.

Answer

Reduce the time-to-live (TTL) for cached items to free up memory faster.

Answer

Configure the cache to use lazy loading only for write-through operations.

Question 19

A database engineer is troubleshooting slow query performance on an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance. The instance is db.r5.large with 500 GB of General Purpose SSD (gp2) storage. CloudWatch metrics show high Read Latency and high Read IOPS, but low CPU utilization. Which TWO actions should the engineer take to improve performance?

Accepted Answer

Create a read replica and offload read queries to it.. A is correct because creating a read replica offloads read queries from the primary instance, reducing the read IOPS and read latency on the primary. This directly addresses the high Read Latency and high Read IOPS metrics without requiring a larger instance class or storage change, especially since CPU utilization is low, indicating the bottleneck is I/O, not compute.

Answer

Increase the DB instance class to a larger size, such as db.r5.2xlarge.

Answer

Enable Multi-AZ to use the standby for read traffic.

Answer

Optimize queries by adding appropriate indexes.

Question 20

A company uses Amazon RDS for SQL Server with Multi-AZ deployment. The security team wants to ensure that all database connections use SSL/TLS encryption. Which TWO actions should the database specialist take to enforce SSL connections? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Create a server-level trigger that requires SSL for all logins.. Option C is correct because SQL Server allows you to create a server-level DDL trigger that checks the login event and enforces SSL by examining the `@@OPTIONS` or `encrypt_option` in `sys.dm_exec_connections`. This is a supported method to force SSL for all connections to an RDS for SQL Server instance. Option E is correct because setting the `rds.force_ssl` parameter to 1 in the DB parameter group is the native RDS mechanism to enforce SSL/TLS for all connections to the DB instance.

Answer

Use the RDS Console to enable 'Force SSL' on the DB instance.

Answer

Modify the DB parameter group to set 'require_secure_transport' to ON.

Answer

Add an inbound rule to the security group that only allows traffic on port 1433 from IP addresses that use SSL.