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DBS-C01 · domain

Management and Operations

Practise AWS Certified Database Specialty DBS-C01 Management and Operations practice questions — original exam-style scenarios with answer choices, explanations, and analysis of common mistakes.

300 questions83 easy112 medium105 hard

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What to know about Management and Operations

Management and Operations questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.

How the topic appears in realistic exam-style scenarios.

Which detail in the question changes the correct answer.

How to eliminate plausible but wrong options.

How to connect the question back to the wider exam objective.

Watch out for

Common Management and Operations exam traps

  • Answering from memory before reading the full scenario.
  • Missing a constraint such as cost, availability, security, scope or command context.
  • Choosing a broad answer when the question asks for the most specific fix.
  • Ignoring why the wrong options are tempting.

Question index

All Management and Operations questions (300)

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1

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity. The application performs many small writes that are throttled frequently. The company wants to minimize costs while reducing throttling. What should the company do?

Hard
2

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. During the migration, they need to ensure minimal downtime. Which AWS service should be used for the migration?

Easy
3

A database administrator is troubleshooting a slow-running query on an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance. The query plan shows a sequential scan on a large table. The table has a primary key and an index on the column used in the WHERE clause. Why might the query optimizer choose a sequential scan over an index scan?

Medium
4

A company is using Amazon ElastiCache for Redis to cache database query results. The cache cluster is a single node. The application experiences increased latency when the cache misses. Which TWO actions can improve the cache hit ratio?

Easy
5

A social media company runs a large Amazon DynamoDB table (Users) with 10 TB of data. The table uses on-demand capacity. Recently, the application started experiencing occasional ProvisionedThroughputExceeded exceptions during read-heavy periods. The table's read metrics show that consumed read capacity is consistently below 50% of provisioned capacity. The application uses eventually consistent reads. The table has a global secondary index (GSI) on the 'status' attribute. The GSI's read capacity consumption is often at 100% of its provisioned capacity. What is the most likely cause of the throttling?

Medium
6

A company is running an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance with Multi-AZ. The company wants to perform a major version upgrade with minimal downtime. Which TWO actions should be taken? (Choose TWO.)

Medium
7

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB and needs to export data to Amazon S3 for analysis. Which AWS service can perform this export without writing custom code?

Easy
8

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 2 TB in size and has a 100 Mbps internet connection. The migration must be completed within 3 days with minimal downtime. Which approach is MOST suitable?

Easy
9

A database team is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. The team needs to ensure minimal downtime and data consistency. Which approach should be used?

Hard
10

A database administrator needs to track changes to an Amazon RDS DB instance's configuration, such as modifications to the DB instance class or security group. Which AWS service should be used?

Easy
11

A database specialist is troubleshooting a performance issue on an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The CPU utilization is consistently above 90%, but the IOPS and memory metrics are well within limits. Which tool should the specialist use to identify the root cause?

Hard
12

A company is deploying an Amazon Aurora MySQL database. The company requires that the database withstand the loss of two copies of data without impacting write availability. Which configuration should the company use?

Hard
13

A gaming company uses Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL for its leaderboard data. The database has a writer instance and two reader instances. The application frequently queries the leaderboard to display top players. The queries involve sorting and aggregation on a large table with millions of rows. Recently, the queries started timing out during peak hours. The database administrator analyzed the workload and found that the reader instances are underutilized, while the writer instance has high CPU due to write operations. The administrator wants to offload the read-heavy leaderboard queries to the readers without modifying the application code. What should the administrator do?

Medium
14

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB with global tables for a multi-region application. The application writes to the table in us-east-1. A developer notices that updates made in us-east-1 are not appearing in the replica in eu-west-1 after several minutes. Which action should be taken to diagnose the issue?

Hard
15

A company is running a production Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. The database administrator needs to perform a minor version upgrade with minimal downtime. Which TWO actions should be taken? (Choose TWO.)

Medium
16

A database administrator notices that the free storage space on an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance is decreasing rapidly. The instance has automated backups enabled with a retention period of 7 days. Which action should be taken to monitor storage usage and prevent running out of space?

Easy
17

A company is using Amazon ElastiCache for Redis to cache database query results. The application team reports that cache hit ratio has dropped significantly. What is the first step to investigate?

Easy
18

A company is using Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition. The database has frequent deadlocks, and the application team suspects that the isolation level is causing the issue. The current isolation level is REPEATABLE READ. The team wants to reduce deadlocks while maintaining data consistency. Which isolation level should be recommended?

Hard
19

A company is using Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment. The DBA receives an alert that the standby replica is lagging behind the primary. Which TWO actions should the DBA take to investigate the issue? (Choose TWO.)

Medium
20

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. Which TWO methods can the database specialist use to minimize downtime during the migration?

Medium
21

Refer to the exhibit. A database administrator runs the AWS CLI command to check the status of an Amazon RDS MySQL DB instance. Based on the output, what action is required to apply the pending modifications?

Hard
22

Refer to the exhibit. An RDS for PostgreSQL instance shows frequent checkpoints every 10 seconds. What is the most likely cause?

Hard
23

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity mode. The application experiences occasional throttling on a table during peak hours. The table's read and write requests are within the throughput limits, but the provisioned read/write capacity is exceeded. What is the most likely cause of this throttling?

Hard
24

A company runs an Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instance in a VPC. The security group for the DB instance allows inbound traffic on port 1433 from the application servers' security group. The application servers can connect to the database, but a database administrator cannot connect from their workstation using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). What is the MOST likely cause?

Easy
25

A company has an Amazon DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity mode. The table experiences a sudden spike in traffic, and the application starts receiving ProvisionedThroughputExceededException errors. What is the most likely cause?

Medium
26

A company is using Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with read replicas to offload read traffic. The company wants to ensure that the read replicas are always in sync with the primary instance. Which metric should the company monitor to detect replication lag?

Medium
27

A company uses Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with Multi-AZ deployment. They experience increased write latency during peak hours. The DB instance size is db.r5.large. Which action would MOST effectively reduce write latency?

Hard
28

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database size is 500 GB. The migration must have minimal downtime. Which AWS service should be used to perform the migration?

Medium
29

A company runs a critical application on an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The company requires that the database be available with minimal downtime during a disaster recovery scenario. The current RDS instance is in us-east-1. The company wants to have a standby database in us-west-2 with automatic failover. What should the company do to meet this requirement?

Hard
30

A company is planning to migrate its on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database uses Oracle Data Guard for disaster recovery. Which TWO AWS services can be used to assess the database and plan the migration? (Choose TWO.)

Easy
31

A financial services company runs an Amazon Aurora MySQL database cluster with a single writer and two readers. The cluster handles critical transactional workloads. Over the past month, the database experienced intermittent read replica lag spikes that caused stale reads in application queries. The database administrator needs to identify the root cause and reduce replica lag. Which THREE steps should the administrator take to diagnose and mitigate the issue?

Hard
32

A company has a production Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster with one writer and two reader instances. The application uses a custom connection pool that uses the writer endpoint for all database calls. The application is experiencing increased latency during peak hours. A database specialist suggests using the reader endpoint for read-only queries. What change is required on the application side to implement this recommendation?

Hard
33

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?

Medium
34

A data warehouse team is migrating from Amazon Redshift to Amazon Redshift RA3 nodes. The current cluster uses 10 DC2.large nodes. The new cluster will use 4 RA3.xlarge nodes. After the migration, the team notices that query performance is significantly slower. Which factor is the MOST likely cause of the performance degradation?

Hard
35

A database administrator is reviewing the configuration of an RDS MySQL instance. Based on the exhibit, which change would MOST improve the database's performance under heavy write workloads without increasing costs significantly?

Easy
36

A database administrator is monitoring Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL using CloudWatch. The DB instance shows high CPU utilization, but the number of connections is normal. What is the most likely cause of the high CPU utilization?

Easy
37

Refer to the exhibit. A database engineer runs the query above to troubleshoot an application error. The query returns no results even though the database is generating errors. What is the most likely reason?

Medium
38

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle using AWS DMS. The source database is 2 TB and has high transaction volume. The migration needs minimal downtime. Currently, full load completes but CDC task fails with 'ORA-1555: snapshot too old' errors. What should the DBA do to resolve this?

Hard
39

A company runs a critical application on Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment. The application performs frequent writes. The DB instance's CPU utilization is consistently above 80%, and the write latency is high. The company wants to improve write performance without changing the application code. Which solution is MOST effective?

Hard
40

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. The database has several large tables with frequent INSERT and UPDATE operations. Which TWO actions should be taken to optimize performance after migration?

Medium
41

A company is migrating its on-premises PostgreSQL database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. The migration must have minimal downtime. Which THREE steps should be taken as part of the migration plan? (Select THREE.)

Easy
42

A company is designing a disaster recovery strategy for Amazon DynamoDB. The strategy must have an RPO of 5 minutes and RTO of 1 hour. Which TWO options meet these requirements? (Choose 2.)

Medium
43

A company runs an Amazon Aurora MySQL database with read replicas to handle read traffic. During a recent load test, the primary instance CPU utilization reached 90%, but read replicas remained below 50%. The application uses a custom ORM that connects to a single endpoint. Which change will best distribute read traffic?

Medium
44

A developer needs to restore an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance to a specific point in time within the retention period. What must be enabled for this operation to be possible?

Easy
45

An Amazon RDS for SQL Server instance is running out of storage space. The instance uses 500 GB of Magnetic storage. The database specialist needs to increase storage to 1 TB with minimal downtime. Which solution meets these requirements?

Easy
46

A company has a production Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Multi-AZ DB instance. The company's security team requires that all database connections use IAM database authentication. The company also needs to ensure that connections from a specific application server are allowed only if the server has a valid IAM role. Which combination of steps should the database administrator take to meet these requirements?

Hard
47

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.)

Hard
48

Refer to the exhibit. An IAM policy is attached to a user who needs to manage Amazon RDS DB instances. When the user attempts to modify a DB instance, they receive an 'AccessDenied' error. What is the most likely cause?

Medium
49

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 2 TB in size and has a 24/7 uptime requirement. The migration must have minimal downtime and support ongoing replication. Which TWO services or features should the specialist use to accomplish this?

Hard
50

A database administrator runs the above AWS CLI command. What is the purpose of the command?

Easy
51

Refer to the exhibit. A database administrator runs the AWS CLI command shown. The output is: ["available", false]. What does this output indicate about the DB instance?

Easy
52

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with global tables. The application writes to a table in the us-east-1 region. The database administrator notices that updates made in us-east-1 are not appearing in the replica table in eu-west-1. What is the most likely cause?

Easy
53

Which TWO actions can be taken to monitor the health of an Amazon DynamoDB table? (Choose 2.)

Medium
54

A SysOps administrator is tasked with monitoring the free storage space on all Amazon RDS DB instances. Which AWS service should be used to set up an alarm that sends an email notification when free storage space falls below a threshold?

Easy
55

A company has an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance that is running low on storage. The current allocated storage is 500 GB, and the free space is down to 10 GB. The database administrator wants to increase storage with minimal downtime. Which action should be taken?

Medium
56

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB for a gaming application. During a new game launch, the table experiences throttling on write requests. The table has a provisioned capacity of 10,000 WCU and 5,000 RCU. The write traffic pattern shows spikes up to 15,000 WCU for 5 minutes. Which action would resolve the throttling with minimal cost impact?

Medium
57

A database administrator is troubleshooting a sudden increase in read latency on an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance. The instance has 200 GB of General Purpose SSD (gp2) storage with 600 provisioned IOPS. The administrator notices that the average queue depth is consistently above 4. Which action is the MOST effective way to reduce read latency?

Easy
58

A company wants to encrypt an existing unencrypted Amazon RDS for SQL Server instance. What is the MOST efficient way to achieve this?

Easy
59

A company's RDS for MySQL instance is experiencing high CPU utilization. Which AWS service should be used to set up automated actions to scale the instance vertically?

Easy
60

A company is using Amazon ElastiCache for Redis as a caching layer in front of an Amazon Aurora MySQL database. The application is experiencing higher latency than expected. Which database design pattern should the specialist recommend to improve read performance?

Hard
61

A company is running an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance with Multi-AZ deployment. The database experiences a failover due to a hardware failure. After the failover, the application team reports that a critical stored procedure is missing. What should the database administrator do to prevent this issue in the future?

Medium
62

A company runs an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance with Multi-AZ enabled. The primary instance is in us-east-1a and the standby is in us-east-1b. During a routine audit, the security team discovers that database connections are being terminated unexpectedly. The database administrator reviews the RDS events and sees an event: 'A Multi-AZ failover has been completed.' What step should be taken to determine the cause of this failover?

Medium
63

A company runs a production Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. The database experiences a failover event. After the failover, the application team reports increased latency for write operations. Which action should be taken to investigate the issue?

Medium
64

A team is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. The database is 2 TB and has a 6-hour maintenance window. Which AWS service should the team use to minimize downtime?

Medium
65

A healthcare company runs a critical application on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with a Multi-AZ deployment. The database stores patient records and must comply with HIPAA regulations. Recently, a security audit revealed that the database is using the default port 5432 and that SSL connections are not enforced. The security team requires that all connections to the database use SSL and that the default port be changed to 5439 to reduce the risk of automated attacks. The database administrator needs to implement these changes with minimal downtime. What should the administrator do?

Medium
66

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 2 TB in size. The company wants to minimize downtime during the migration. Which AWS service should be used to perform an online migration with minimal downtime?

Medium
67

A company has an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster with a single writer and two readers. The writer instance fails, and the failover mechanism promotes one of the readers to writer. The application, which uses a custom connection pool, continues to experience errors for several minutes. What should the database administrator do to minimize downtime during future failovers?

Easy
68

Refer to the exhibit. An IAM policy statement allows creating manual snapshots for an RDS instance. A database administrator is unable to create a snapshot from the AWS Management Console. The error message indicates insufficient permissions. What is the likely cause?

Hard
69

A company is running a production Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The database size is 500 GB and the workload is write-heavy. The team notices that the automated backups are taking longer than expected and are impacting the performance during the backup window. Which action should be taken to minimize the performance impact?

Medium
70

A company is migrating a PostgreSQL database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. The database has a large table that is frequently accessed. The team wants to minimize downtime during the migration. Which TWO strategies should be used together?

Medium
71

A database administrator is troubleshooting a performance issue on an Amazon RDS for SQL Server instance. The CPU utilization is consistently above 90%, and the number of database connections is high. Which Amazon CloudWatch metric should be analyzed first to determine if the issue is due to a specific query?

Medium
72

A database administrator needs to monitor the number of database connections to an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance. Which Amazon CloudWatch metric should the administrator use?

Easy
73

An e-commerce company uses Amazon ElastiCache for Redis as a session store for its web application. The application experiences occasional latency spikes during flash sales. The operations team notices that the Redis cluster's CPU utilization reaches 90% during these events. The current cluster is a single shard with a cache.r5.large node. The team wants to reduce CPU utilization and improve performance. What should the database administrator do?

Easy
74

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 500 GB in size and has a 24/7 uptime requirement. The migration window is limited to 2 hours. Which strategy should be used to minimize downtime?

Hard
75

A company is using Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition. The database is experiencing performance degradation due to long-running queries. The DBA needs to identify the queries that are consuming the most resources. Which action should be taken?

Medium
76

Refer to the exhibit. A database administrator runs the AWS CLI command to retrieve CloudWatch metrics for an Amazon RDS DB instance. The output shows a spike in WriteLatency at 10:05 UTC. What is the most likely cause of this spike?

Easy
77

A database administrator needs to retain backups of an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance for 7 years to meet compliance requirements. The automated backup retention period is limited to 35 days. Which solution should be used?

Easy
78

A company has an Amazon Redshift cluster with a single node. The cluster is used for reporting. Recently, queries have become slow, and the cluster's disk space is 80% full. Which action should be taken to improve query performance and manage storage?

Medium
79

A company is running an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance with Multi-AZ. The database experiences a failover during a maintenance window. After the failover, the application connection pool continues to use the old primary endpoint, causing connection errors. What is the BEST way to ensure application connections automatically redirect to the new primary after a failover?

Medium
80

An administrator is troubleshooting a permissions issue. A user with the IAM policy shown is unable to share an automated system snapshot with another AWS account. Which action should the administrator take to resolve this issue?

Hard
81

A company has an Amazon DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity mode. They notice that write requests are being throttled during peak hours. The table has a global secondary index (GSI) that is also throttled. Which action should the database specialist take to resolve the throttling?

Hard
82

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database size is 2 TB and the network bandwidth is limited. The company needs to minimize downtime during migration. Which AWS service should be used?

Hard
83

A multinational e-commerce company runs an Amazon Aurora MySQL database for its product catalog. The database is 2 TB and has a high write volume. The company needs to create a test environment that contains a subset (10%) of the production data for developers to use. The test environment must be refreshed daily with the latest production data. The operations team wants to minimize cost and ensure that the test environment does not impact production performance. Which solution should they implement?

Hard
84

A company has an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance with automated backups enabled. The retention period is set to 7 days. A developer accidentally performed a DROP TABLE operation on a critical table 2 days ago. How can the table be recovered with minimal data loss?

Easy
85

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB for a web application. The company notices that read requests to a particular table are throttled during peak hours. The table has a provisioned read capacity of 1000 read capacity units (RCUs). The read requests are mostly eventually consistent reads. What should the company do to reduce throttling without changing the application code?

Easy
86

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity. The operations team wants to monitor for throttled read requests. Which metric from Amazon CloudWatch should be used to set up an alarm for read throttling?

Medium
87

A company is running a MongoDB-compatible Amazon DocumentDB cluster. The application experiences high write latency during peak hours. The database administrator checks the CloudWatch metrics and notices that the Write IOPS metric is consistently at the maximum for the instance size. What should the administrator do to reduce write latency?

Hard
88

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB for a gaming application. During a new game launch, write traffic spikes and some users receive 'ProvisionedThroughputExceededException' errors. The company wants to handle these spikes automatically and cost-effectively. What should be done?

Hard
89

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with provisioned capacity and Auto Scaling. They notice that during a marketing campaign, write traffic exceeded the provisioned WCU and caused throttling. Auto Scaling increased the WCU, but the throttling persisted for several minutes. Which additional measure can prevent throttling during such predictable spikes?

Hard
90

A database administrator is troubleshooting a backup failure for an Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instance. The error message states 'Insufficient storage capacity for backup. Free storage space is 0 GB.' The DB instance has 200 GB allocated storage. What is the most likely cause?

Medium
91

A developer accidentally deleted a critical table from an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. Automated backups are enabled with a retention period of 7 days. The deletion occurred 3 hours ago. What is the fastest way to restore the deleted table without affecting other tables?

Easy
92

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with auto scaling enabled. The table's read capacity is set to a minimum of 100 and maximum of 1000 read capacity units (RCUs). The actual consumed read capacity is consistently at 200 RCUs. What should the database specialist do to optimize costs without impacting performance?

Easy
93

Match each AWS monitoring tool to its capability for databases.

Medium
94

A DBA runs the IAM policy simulation above. The DBA can describe the DB instance but cannot modify it. What is the most likely cause?

Medium
95

A company is running an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The database performance has degraded over time, and the company suspects that slow queries are the cause. Which AWS service should the company use to identify the slow queries and analyze the database performance?

Easy
96

A company is migrating a 5 TB MySQL database to Amazon Aurora MySQL. The migration must have minimal downtime and support ongoing replication. The source database is in a corporate data center with a 500 Mbps internet connection. Which THREE steps should the database specialist take?

Hard
97

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with global tables (multi-region) for a gaming application. The application writes to a table in us-east-1 and reads from a table in eu-west-1. The team notices that writes in us-east-1 are taking longer than expected to propagate to eu-west-1. What is the most likely cause?

Hard
98

Refer to the exhibit. A DBA deploys this CloudFormation stack. After creation, the DBA needs to enable deletion protection for the DB instance. Which modification to the template would accomplish this?

Medium
99

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 500 GB and has a 4-hour downtime window. Which AWS service should be used to perform the migration with minimal downtime?

Easy
100

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB to store session data for a web application. The application is experiencing occasional throttling (ProvisionedThroughputExceededException) during peak hours. The DynamoDB table has on-demand capacity mode. Which combination of steps should be taken to resolve the issue?

Hard
101

A database specialist observes the CloudWatch metric for a production RDS for MySQL instance. The max_connections parameter is set to 150. The Sum of DatabaseConnections over 1-minute periods is shown. The application reports intermittent connection failures. What is the most likely cause?

Hard
102

A company is using Amazon RDS for Oracle with Automated Backups enabled. The database size is 1 TB. The company wants to improve the backup and restore performance. Which TWO actions should be taken? (Choose two.)

Easy
103

An Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance has a high number of connections and the application is experiencing slow response times. The database administrator wants to identify the queries that are causing the most load. Which approach is most effective?

Medium
104

A company is using Amazon Redshift for data warehousing. They notice that query performance has degraded over time. The database administrator checks the system tables and finds that there is significant skew in data distribution across slices. What action should be taken to improve query performance?

Medium
105

A company is using Amazon RDS for SQL Server with Always On Availability Groups. The primary DB instance is in us-east-1, and the secondary is in us-west-2. The application writes to the primary and reads from the secondary. The secondary instance becomes unreachable due to a network issue. What happens to the primary instance?

Medium
106

A company is running an Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instance. The company needs to capture changes to a specific table and replicate them to an Amazon S3 bucket in near real time. Which AWS service should be used to achieve this?

Medium
107

A database specialist created the above IAM policy for a user. When the user attempts to delete an item from the Orders table, what happens?

Hard
108

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB with provisioned capacity for a gaming application. During a new game launch, write traffic spikes to 2x the provisioned write capacity for 30 minutes. Some writes are throttled. The company wants to handle these predictable spikes without manual intervention. What is the MOST cost-effective solution?

Medium
109

A company runs an Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. The application experiences intermittent read latency spikes. The DB instance type is db.r5.large with 500 GB of General Purpose SSD (gp2) storage. The spike occurs during peak hours when read activity is high. Which action would most effectively reduce read latency?

Medium
110

A company is running Amazon Redshift for data warehousing. The data warehouse is used for complex analytical queries. Recently, query performance has degraded due to data skew. Which steps should be taken to address this issue?

Medium
111

A company is using Amazon RDS for MySQL with a cross-Region read replica to support disaster recovery. The primary DB instance is in us-west-2, and the read replica is in us-east-1. The read replica is used for reporting and also serves as a failover target. The operations team notices that the read replica lag is consistently above 10 seconds during peak hours. What should the team do to reduce replica lag?

Medium
112

Which TWO of the following are valid strategies for reducing costs for an Amazon DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity mode? (Choose TWO.)

Medium
113

A developer accidentally deleted a table in an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance. The instance has automated backups enabled with a retention period of 7 days. The deletion occurred 2 hours ago. What is the quickest way to recover the table?

Easy
114

A company is running an Amazon Redshift cluster with a single node. They need to improve query performance for large analytical workloads. Which action would provide the most immediate performance improvement?

Medium
115

A company is running an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The DB instance is experiencing high CPU utilization due to a sudden increase in read traffic. The company needs to reduce the load on the primary DB instance with minimal downtime. Which solution should be used?

Medium
116

A developer accidentally deleted a production RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance. The company has automated backups enabled with a retention period of 7 days. What is the fastest way to restore the database to the state just before the deletion?

Easy
117

A company runs an Amazon Aurora MySQL database. The database experiences a sudden spike in connections and then becomes unresponsive. The DB instance has a db.r5.large class with 8 GB memory. The maximum connections parameter is set to the default. Which is the most likely cause of the unresponsiveness?

Hard
118

Which THREE actions can be performed using the AWS CLI for Amazon Aurora? (Choose three.)

Medium
119

A company is migrating a large on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 5 TB in size, and the migration must be completed within a week. The company has a dedicated 10 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connection. Which TWO AWS services should the company use to minimize downtime during the migration?

Medium
120

A company runs a production Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. The database specialist needs to perform a major version upgrade with minimal downtime. Which strategy should the specialist use?

Medium
121

A company is running an Amazon DynamoDB table with global secondary indexes (GSIs). Write activity increases, and the 'ThrottledWriteEvents' metric for a GSI spikes. The table itself is not throttled. What is the most likely cause?

Hard
122

Which TWO of the following are benefits of using Amazon RDS Proxy? (Choose TWO.)

Easy
123

A company has an Amazon DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity mode. The table experiences occasional spikes in traffic. During these spikes, some requests receive ProvisionedThroughputExceededException errors. The company wants to minimize these errors without changing the application. Which solution should be used?

Medium
124

A company is running an Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. They notice increased latency during peak hours. The DB instance type is db.r5.large, and the storage is General Purpose SSD (gp2) with 500 GB. The application is read-heavy with frequent SELECT queries. Which action would most likely resolve the latency issue without changing the DB instance class?

Medium
125

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB for a high-traffic web application. The table has on-demand capacity mode. During a marketing event, the application experiences throttling. Which TWO actions should the database specialist take to prevent throttling in future events?

Medium
126

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. The migration must have minimal downtime and support ongoing replication. Which THREE services should the company use? (Choose 3.)

Hard
127

Refer to the exhibit. A DBA is checking the backup configuration of an RDS MySQL instance. The current time is 2023-03-15T06:00:00Z. What is the most recent point to which the database can be restored?

Easy
128

A database administrator sees the above error logs in CloudWatch for an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance. The application team confirms that the password for 'app_user' is correct. What is the most likely cause of the authentication failures?

Hard
129

Which TWO of the following are valid actions to take when an Amazon Redshift query is taking longer than expected due to disk-based operations?

Hard
130

A company wants to ensure that their Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database is automatically backed up every day and retains backups for 30 days. Which configuration should they use?

Easy
131

Which TWO AWS services can be used to monitor and set alarms on Amazon RDS database performance metrics? (Choose two.)

Easy
132

Refer to the exhibit. An Amazon RDS for Oracle instance is experiencing ORA-00257 errors. The DBA has already increased the archive log retention setting. What is the most efficient next step to resolve the issue without manual intervention?

Hard
133

Which TWO methods can be used to encrypt an existing unencrypted Amazon RDS for Oracle DB instance? (Choose 2.)

Medium
134

Arrange the steps to perform a point-in-time recovery (PITR) for an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance in the correct order.

Medium
135

A database specialist is managing an Amazon RDS for Oracle DB instance. The instance has a large amount of data and the specialist needs to migrate it to a new instance in a different AWS Region. Which method would minimize downtime and be the most efficient?

Medium
136

Which THREE factors should be considered when selecting the backup strategy for an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance? (Choose 3.)

Hard
137

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB for a gaming application. The application stores player scores in a table with a partition key of player_id and a sort key of timestamp. The company wants to query the top 10 scores for a given player efficiently. Which TWO steps should the company take to optimize this query?

Medium
138

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with Auto Scaling enabled. During a flash sale, write traffic spikes and the application experiences ProvisionedThroughputExceededException errors. The DynamoDB table has provisioned write capacity of 1000 WCU and Auto Scaling is set to scale between 1000 and 10000 WCU. What is the most likely cause of the throttling?

Hard
139

A company is migrating an on-premises MongoDB database to Amazon DocumentDB. The migration must have minimal downtime. Which THREE steps should be taken? (Choose three.)

Hard
140

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity for a mobile application. During a marketing campaign, write traffic spikes to 10,000 writes per second for 5 minutes. The application experiences throttling after the first minute. The DynamoDB table has a single partition key. What should be done to prevent throttling in future campaigns?

Hard
141

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity mode. The application experiences occasional throttling during peak hours. The operations team wants to reduce throttling without changing the application code. What should they do?

Easy
142

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB for a gaming application. During a new game launch, the application experiences high latency and throttling on a table with a partition key of 'user_id' and a sort key of 'timestamp'. The access pattern is to query recent items for a given user. Which TWO design changes can improve performance?

Medium
143

A company runs an Amazon DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity. They notice that a specific partition key receives a high volume of read requests, causing throttling for that partition. What is the BEST solution to distribute the load evenly?

Medium
144

A DBA runs the above AWS CLI command. The DB instance is an Amazon RDS for MySQL instance. The DBA needs to connect to the database from an EC2 instance in the same VPC but cannot connect. Which action should be taken first?

Hard
145

A database administrator notices that an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance has experienced a failover during a maintenance window. What is the most likely cause of this failover?

Easy
146

A development team is using Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity mode for a new application. During initial testing, they notice that write requests are occasionally throttled during traffic bursts. They have enabled DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) for read-heavy operations. What is the best recommendation to eliminate write throttling?

Hard
147

A database administrator is responsible for managing an Amazon RDS for Oracle DB instance. The DBA needs to ensure that all changes to the DB instance's security group rules are logged for audit purposes. Which TWO services can be used together to achieve this? (Select TWO.)

Hard
148

Which TWO of the following are valid methods to secure data at rest for an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance?

Easy
149

A company attaches the above IAM policy to a user. The user tries to modify the DB instance 'prod-db' in us-east-1. What is the result?

Hard
150

A company is using Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment. The primary instance recently experienced an unexpected failover due to a hardware failure. The database is 2 TB in size and has high write throughput. Which TWO actions should the database administrator take to minimize recovery time and ensure data durability?

Medium
151

A financial services company runs a production Amazon Aurora MySQL database cluster (1 writer, 2 readers) in us-east-1. The database stores critical trading data. The company's disaster recovery policy requires an RPO of 5 seconds and an RTO of 1 minute for a regional failure. The current setup does not include any cross-region replication. The database is 5 TB in size. The operations team needs to implement a solution that meets the DR requirements with minimal cost and operational overhead. Which solution should the team implement?

Hard
152

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity for a serverless web application. The application experiences occasional throttling. The DynamoDB table has a simple primary key (partition key only). The throttled requests are related to a small number of partition keys. What is the MOST likely cause?

Easy
153

A company runs an Amazon Redshift cluster with three nodes. The data warehouse team notices that some queries are slow due to high disk usage. The cluster has reached 80% storage capacity. What is the MOST cost-effective way to increase storage without interrupting operations?

Medium
154

A company uses Amazon ElastiCache for Redis as a caching layer for its e-commerce application. Recently, the cache hit ratio has dropped significantly, causing increased database load. The operations team needs to identify which cache keys are being evicted. What should they do?

Medium
155

Which THREE factors should be considered when choosing between Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon RDS for a new application? (Choose three.)

Hard
156

A company is using Amazon Redshift for data warehousing. The database administrator needs to identify which queries are consuming the most resources. Which system view should be queried?

Medium
157

Which THREE of the following are best practices for managing Amazon DynamoDB tables with provisioned throughput?

Medium
158

A company is migrating an on-premises Microsoft SQL Server database to Amazon RDS for SQL Server. The database uses SQL Server Agent jobs, custom CLR assemblies, and cross-database queries. Which of the following will require modification before migration?

Hard
159

A database specialist is troubleshooting a performance issue on an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster. The cluster has a primary instance and two Aurora Replicas. The application is experiencing high read latency. Which THREE actions should the specialist take to identify the cause?

Hard
160

A database administrator needs to audit all SQL queries executed on an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance, including SELECT statements. Which two most efficient ways to achieve this?

Easy
161

A company is migrating its on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 2 TB in size and contains both transactional and analytical workloads. The company uses Oracle Data Pump for migration. During the migration, the database specialist notices that the export job on the source database is taking longer than expected and is generating significant I/O, impacting production performance. The company needs to minimize the impact on the source database while completing the migration within a 48-hour window. The source database is currently running on a dedicated server with sufficient CPU and memory. Which course of action should the database specialist take?

Easy
162

A database administrator is troubleshooting an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance that is experiencing high CPU utilization. The administrator runs the following query to find the current running queries: SELECT pid, now() - pg_stat_activity.query_start AS duration, query, state FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE state = 'active'; The output shows a high number of queries with a state of 'active' and durations exceeding several minutes. What should the administrator do FIRST to reduce CPU utilization?

Hard
163

Which THREE factors should be considered when planning a cross-Region disaster recovery strategy for an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster? (Choose 3.)

Hard
164

A media streaming company uses Amazon DynamoDB as the primary data store for user session information. The table has a partition key of 'user_id' (String) and a sort key of 'session_start_time' (Number). The table is provisioned with 5000 read capacity units (RCU) and 5000 write capacity units (WCU). Over the past week, the company noticed occasional throttling on writes during peak hours, even though the average consumed WCU is only 3500. The DynamoDB table also experiences hot partitions. The development team is considering using DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to cache read-heavy workloads, but the issue is with writes. The database administrator needs to resolve the write throttling and hot partitions. Which action should the administrator take?

Hard
165

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB with auto scaling enabled. During a flash sale, write traffic spikes and some requests receive ThrottlingException errors. The table's write capacity auto scaling reaches the maximum configured capacity but still throttles. Which TWO actions should resolve the throttling? (Choose TWO.)

Hard
166

A company needs to ensure that all changes to an Amazon RDS DB instance's security group are logged for auditing purposes. Which AWS service should be enabled?

Easy
167

Match each AWS database feature to its description.

Medium
168

A database administrator needs to monitor the number of connections to an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance. Which Amazon CloudWatch metric should be used?

Easy
169

A company runs a production Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance with 10 TB of storage. The application team notices that database write latency has increased from 5 ms to 80 ms over the past week. The DB instance is a db.r5.8xlarge with 500 GB of gp2 storage. CloudWatch metrics show WriteIOPS averaging 10,000, WriteThroughput at 50 MB/s, and BurstBalance decreasing from 100% to 20% over the same period. The DB instance has no reserved IOPS. The database workload is write-heavy with frequent small transactions. The company needs to resolve the high write latency while minimizing costs and downtime. Which solution should the database specialist recommend?

Hard
170

A company is running a MongoDB-compatible Amazon DocumentDB cluster. The application is experiencing high write latency during peak hours. The cluster has one writer and two readers. The DBA suspects that the issue is due to a large number of indexes on the collection. What should the DBA do to verify this hypothesis without affecting production?

Hard
171

A DBA sees the above error log entries for an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance. What is the most likely cause?

Easy
172

A database engineer is troubleshooting an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster that is experiencing frequent failovers. The failovers are occurring during periods of low write activity. The engineer notices that the primary instance's writer endpoint is being used for read traffic from a legacy application. What is the most likely cause of the failovers?

Medium
173

A company is running Amazon Redshift and notices that queries are slow. The administrator runs the STL_ALERT_EVENT_LOG and sees many 'Nested Loop Join' alerts. What is the MOST likely cause?

Hard
174

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB for a high-traffic gaming leaderboard. The table has a partition key of 'game_id' and a sort key of 'score'. During a tournament, the application experiences throttling on a single partition. The application uses strongly consistent reads. Which TWO actions should be taken to resolve the throttling and maintain performance?

Hard
175

A company runs an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance with Multi-AZ. The application team reports that a recent schema change caused a significant increase in replication lag. The instance has a read replica in a different AWS Region. Which THREE actions should be taken to reduce replication lag?

Medium
176

A company runs an Amazon RDS for SQL Server database. The database size is 500 GB. The company needs to create a test environment with a copy of the production database that refreshes daily. Which THREE steps should be taken to automate this? (Choose THREE.)

Medium
177

A company is using Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with Multi-AZ deployment. The database administrator needs to perform a minor version upgrade with minimal downtime. Which TWO actions should the administrator take? (Choose TWO.)

Medium
178

A company is using Amazon RDS for MariaDB. The database administrator wants to monitor the database for slow queries. Which TWO services can be used to achieve this? (Choose TWO.)

Easy
179

A company's Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance is experiencing high CPU utilization. The DB instance is a db.r5.xlarge with 500 GB of General Purpose SSD (gp2) storage. The application team reports that write-intensive batch jobs are causing latency. The DBA notices that the ReadIOPS metric is low but WriteIOPS is consistently near the instance's maximum. Which action would most effectively reduce write latency?

Hard
180

A database specialist sees the above error log entries from an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. Which action should be taken to resolve the issue?

Hard
181

A database specialist runs the CLI command shown. The output indicates the instance is Multi-AZ and available. The application, however, is experiencing intermittent connection timeouts to the database endpoint. What is the most likely cause?

Hard
182

A company's RDS for SQL Server instance has been running for 3 years. The DBA notices that the DB instance's allocated storage (500 GB) is 80% full. The application is write-heavy. The DBA needs to increase storage without downtime. What is the most efficient way to achieve this?

Hard
183

A company runs an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster as a caching layer for a high-traffic web application. The cluster has one primary and two replica nodes. Recently, the application experienced increased latency. Monitoring shows that the CPU utilization of the primary node is consistently above 80%, while replicas are below 40%. The application uses the cluster mode disabled. The operations team needs to reduce the CPU load on the primary node. Which solution should they implement?

Medium
184

Refer to the exhibit. An IAM policy is attached to a role used by an application running on Amazon EC2. The application needs to read items from a DynamoDB table named 'MyTable' and create manual snapshots of an RDS instance. What is the issue with the policy?

Medium
185

A company uses Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment. The primary instance fails and the database administrator notices that the failover did not happen automatically. What is the MOST likely cause?

Hard
186

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with a global table for a multi-region application. The application is deployed in us-east-1 and eu-west-1. The company notices that write latency to eu-west-1 is higher than expected. Which TWO actions can reduce write latency? (Choose TWO.)

Medium
187

A database administrator runs the 'describe-db-clusters' CLI command and sees the above output. The earliest restorable time is December 1, 2023. However, the backup retention period is 7 days. Why is the earliest restorable time earlier than 7 days from now (assuming today is December 5, 2023)?

Hard
188

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.)

Medium
189

A company's production RDS for PostgreSQL instance experienced a failover to the standby replica. After the failover, the application team reports that writes are failing with 'ReadOnlyException: Connection is read-only'. The DB instance status in the RDS console shows 'available'. Which action should the database administrator take to resolve the issue?

Medium
190

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity mode. The company notices that during a flash sale, the write requests are throttled. What is the most likely cause of the throttling?

Easy
191

A company manages multiple RDS for PostgreSQL instances in different AWS accounts. The security team requires that all DB instances have automated backups enabled with a retention period of at least 14 days. How can the company enforce this policy across all accounts?

Medium
192

A company is designing a disaster recovery strategy for an Amazon Aurora MySQL database with a recovery point objective (RPO) of 1 second and a recovery time objective (RTO) of 1 minute. Which TWO solutions meet these requirements? (Choose TWO.)

Easy
193

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity for a gaming leaderboard. During a promotional event, write traffic spikes 10x, causing occasional 'ProvisionedThroughputExceededException' errors. The application retries with exponential backoff, but latency increases. The team notices that the 'ThrottledWriteRequests' metric spikes. What is the MOST cost-effective solution to handle these unpredictable spikes?

Hard
194

An e-learning platform uses Amazon Aurora MySQL for its database. The application runs reporting queries that scan large portions of the database, causing high CPU utilization on the primary instance. The primary instance is a db.r5.2xlarge with 64 GB memory. The reporting queries are not time-sensitive but need to return results within 5 minutes. The operations team wants to reduce the impact on the primary instance without increasing costs significantly. Which action should be taken?

Medium
195

A company is running an Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instance. The database administrator needs to perform a major version upgrade. What is the recommended approach to minimize downtime?

Medium
196

An IAM user has the policy shown. The user is trying to restore a DB instance from a manual snapshot using the AWS CLI. The restore fails with an access denied error. What is the most likely reason?

Medium
197

A company is migrating its on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 2 TB in size and the network bandwidth is 100 Mbps. The migration must have minimal downtime. Which TWO approaches should be used together to achieve this?

Medium
198

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. The database has several stored procedures that use Oracle-specific PL/SQL. The team needs to minimize manual code changes. Which AWS service or tool should be used to automate the conversion of the stored procedures?

Hard
199

A database administrator is using AWS DMS to migrate an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The migration has been running for several hours, but the full load phase is taking much longer than expected. The CPU utilization on the DMS replication instance is consistently below 10%. What is the MOST likely cause of the slow performance?

Hard
200

A company uses Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with a single-AZ deployment. The operations team needs to ensure that the database is available during a planned maintenance event that requires a reboot. The maintenance window is set for 30 minutes. The database size is 200 GB and the application can tolerate a few minutes of downtime. Which action should the team take to minimize downtime during the reboot?

Easy
201

A company is running an Amazon RDS for MySQL instance with Multi-AZ. The primary instance in us-east-1a fails, and the standby in us-east-1b is promoted. The application cannot connect after failover. Which TWO steps should the database administrator take to restore connectivity?

Medium
202

A company is running an Amazon RDS for SQL Server Multi-AZ DB instance. During a recent failover test, the application experienced a timeout of 60 seconds. The application uses a connection string that points to the CNAME of the DB instance. Which configuration change would reduce the failover time?

Medium
203

A company needs to ensure that all changes to an Amazon RDS DB instance are logged for auditing purposes. Which AWS service should be enabled?

Easy
204

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.)

Hard
205

A company is running an Amazon DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity mode. The table experiences occasional throttling during peak hours. The application team wants to understand the read/write patterns to optimize the table design. Which approach should the database specialist take to analyze the throttling events?

Hard
206

A developer accidentally deleted a critical table from an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. Automated backups are enabled with a retention period of 7 days. The deletion occurred 3 hours ago. Which action can restore the table with minimal data loss?

Easy
207

A company runs a critical e-commerce application on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with a db.r5.2xlarge instance and 500 GB of gp2 storage. The application experiences periodic write spikes during flash sales. During these events, the WriteIOPS metric exceeds the provisioned baseline IOPS of 1,500, and the database becomes unresponsive for several seconds. The DBA has configured a CloudWatch alarm on WriteIOPS, but the alarm triggers after the performance issue occurs. The company needs to ensure that the database can handle these spikes without downtime. The budget allows for moderate cost increases. What should the DBA do?

Hard
208

A company has an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance with automated backups enabled. The database is 500 GB in size. The company wants to create a new test database from the current state with minimal impact on production. Which approach meets these requirements?

Hard
209

A company needs to audit all SQL queries executed on an Amazon RDS for SQL Server database. Which AWS service should be used?

Easy
210

A database specialist sees the above error in the application logs for an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The application is a web server running on an EC2 instance. What is the most likely cause?

Easy
211

A company runs a critical application on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with Multi-AZ. The database has a large table (over 500 GB) that is frequently updated. The operations team notices that the primary instance's CPU usage is consistently above 90%, and the replica lag between the primary and standby is increasing during peak hours. The application can tolerate a few seconds of downtime. The team needs to reduce CPU load and improve write performance without changing the application code. Which action should be taken?

Hard
212

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity mode for a critical application. During a marketing campaign, the application experienced throttled requests despite the on-demand mode. The table has a single partition key. The database specialist notices that the throttling occurs sporadically even though overall traffic is within limits. What is the most likely cause?

Hard
213

A company has an Amazon Redshift cluster with two dc2.large nodes. The cluster is used for daily ETL jobs and reporting. The operations team receives an alert that the cluster's disk space is 90% full. The ETL jobs are failing with 'disk full' errors. The team needs to resolve the issue quickly with minimal downtime. Which action should be taken?

Easy
214

A company is running a production Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. The database experiences intermittent high latency and the CloudWatch 'ReadLatency' metric spikes during periods of heavy read traffic. The application uses a single database endpoint. What is the MOST effective way to reduce read latency without changing the application code?

Medium
215

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity. The operations team notices that the number of throttled write requests has increased. Which metric should be monitored to determine if the table's write capacity is being exceeded?

Medium
216

A database administrator runs the above AWS CLI command to troubleshoot replication issues. The DB instance 'mydb' is a read replica of 'my-source-db'. The administrator notices that the replica lag is increasing. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause?

Hard
217

A company has an Amazon DynamoDB table with provisioned capacity. The table experiences occasional spikes in write traffic that exceed the provisioned write capacity units (WCU). Which feature should the database specialist enable to handle these spikes without throttling?

Easy
218

A company's Amazon RDS for Oracle instance is running out of storage space. The database administrator wants to add storage without downtime. Which action should be taken?

Medium
219

A company uses Amazon RDS for MySQL with read replicas. The application writes to the primary and reads from the replicas. Occasionally, the application reads stale data from the replicas. Which action would ensure read-after-write consistency without impacting write performance?

Hard
220

A company has an Amazon DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity mode. The table is used by a serverless application. The company wants to receive an alert when the read request rate exceeds a certain threshold. Which CloudWatch metric and alarm should be used?

Easy
221

A company runs a critical Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. They notice that the 'DiskQueueDepth' metric is consistently high and the 'FreeStorageSpace' is below 10%. The database is used for OLTP workloads. What is the MOST immediate action to take?

Hard
222

An Amazon RDS for Oracle DB instance is experiencing high swap usage. The database administrator wants to reduce swap usage. Which action should be taken?

Medium
223

The exhibit shows an IAM policy attached to a user. The user needs to create a manual snapshot of an RDS DB instance named 'production-db'. Which action will the user be able to perform?

Hard
224

A company runs a production Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance with Multi-AZ. The database is used by a web application. The application team reports that the database is experiencing intermittent connection timeouts and increased latency. The CloudWatch metrics show that the database connections spike to the maximum allowed (max_connections) during peak hours, and the CPU utilization is high. The team needs to resolve the connection issues without modifying the application code. The application uses connection pooling at the application layer. Which action should be taken?

Hard
225

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 2 TB in size and has a tight migration window of 8 hours. Which THREE steps should be taken to minimize downtime during the migration?

Hard
226

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with Auto Scaling enabled. The database specialist notices that write traffic is being throttled occasionally. Which TWO factors could cause throttling despite Auto Scaling?

Easy
227

A company uses Amazon ElastiCache for Redis to cache frequently accessed data. The cache cluster experiences high CPU utilization during peak hours. The cluster has a single node of type cache.r5.large. What is the most cost-effective way to reduce CPU utilization while maintaining performance?

Medium
228

The exhibit shows the output of a MySQL command run on an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The database is experiencing frequent checkpointing that is causing I/O spikes. The parameter innodb_log_file_size is currently 256 MB. Which change should be made to reduce checkpoint frequency?

Medium
229

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with provisioned capacity for a table that experiences unpredictable traffic spikes. The table's read capacity is often underutilized, but occasionally throttling occurs. Which THREE steps should be taken to improve performance and cost? (Choose THREE.)

Hard
230

A company recently migrated an on-premises PostgreSQL database to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The database is 100 GB and used by a web application. After migration, the application's response time increased. The 'ReadLatency' and 'WriteLatency' metrics are normal. The 'CPUUtilization' is at 90%. The 'DatabaseConnections' metric shows 200 connections, which is close to the max connections for the instance class (db.t3.medium, max connections = 200). The application uses connection pooling. The team wants to reduce CPU utilization without changing the application code. Which action should the team take?

Easy
231

Which THREE of the following are required to set up cross-Region replication for an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance? (Choose THREE.)

Hard
232

A company is using Amazon Redshift for data warehousing. The database administrator needs to optimize query performance. Which TWO actions should the administrator take? (Choose TWO.)

Medium
233

A company runs an Amazon Aurora MySQL database cluster with a primary instance and two Aurora Replicas. The application is experiencing occasional deadlocks on the primary instance during peak hours. The deadlocks cause transaction rollbacks that impact customer experience. Which design change should the company implement to minimize deadlocks?

Medium
234

A company runs an Amazon Aurora MySQL database cluster with one writer and one reader instance. The application experiences intermittent connection timeouts during peak traffic. The DB cluster parameter group has 'connect_timeout' set to 5 seconds. What should a database specialist recommend to reduce connection timeouts?

Medium
235

An e-commerce application uses Amazon Aurora MySQL with a Multi-AZ DB cluster. During a recent load test, the application experienced increased read latency. The database cluster consists of one writer and two reader instances. Which THREE actions should be taken to improve read performance?

Hard
236

A company is running an Amazon RDS for SQL Server instance and wants to automate the patching of the database engine. Which AWS service should be used?

Easy
237

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB for a gaming leaderboard. The table has a partition key of 'game_id' and a sort key of 'score'. The application performs a query to retrieve the top 10 scores for a given game_id. The query uses ScanIndexForward: false and Limit: 10. Recently, the query response time has increased. The table's read capacity is 1000 RCU, and the average item size is 1 KB. Which is the most likely cause of the increased latency?

Hard
238

A company runs an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster with one writer and two readers. The application experiences increased read latency. The DBA wants to offload read traffic from the writer instance. Which configuration change should be made to the application?

Easy
239

A company runs a critical e-commerce application on Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ enabled. The database is 2 TB and uses General Purpose (gp2) storage. Recently, during peak hours, the application experienced a 5-minute outage. The CloudWatch logs show that the primary DB instance failed and an automatic failover occurred. However, the failover took 3 minutes, which is longer than the expected 1-2 minutes. The 'ReadLatency' and 'WriteLatency' metrics were elevated before the failure. The 'BurstBalance' metric was at 0% for the hour before the failure. The team suspects the issue is related to storage performance. What should the team do to prevent this issue in the future?

Hard
240

Which TWO methods can be used to reduce the read latency for an Amazon Aurora MySQL database? (Choose 2.)

Medium
241

A company runs a production Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database with automated backups enabled. A database administrator accidentally dropped a critical table. The administrator wants to restore the table from a point in time before the drop. The database is 1 TB in size and the recovery point objective (RPO) is 5 minutes. Which approach minimizes downtime?

Hard
242

A company has an Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instance with Multi-AZ deployment. During a recent failover test, the application experienced a longer downtime than expected. The application uses a single connection string. What change should be made to reduce failover downtime?

Hard
243

A company is migrating its on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 2 TB in size and has a 24-hour maintenance window. The company needs to minimize downtime during the migration. Which AWS service should be used to perform the migration with minimal downtime?

Medium
244

A data engineer is troubleshooting a slow-running query on an Amazon Redshift cluster. The query involves large table joins and aggregations. Which diagnostic step should be taken FIRST to understand the query execution plan and identify bottlenecks?

Medium
245

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB with provisioned capacity. The application team reports occasional ProvisionedThroughputExceededException errors. The database administrator notices that the errors occur during periods of high traffic. What is the most cost-effective way to handle these errors without over-provisioning capacity?

Easy
246

A company is using Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition. The database administrator notices that the Aurora cluster has a high number of binary log (binlog) files in the cluster volume, consuming significant storage. The binlog retention period is set to 24 hours. What is the most efficient way to reduce the storage consumed by binlog files without compromising point-in-time recovery (PITR)?

Hard
247

A database administrator needs to monitor Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL connections and terminate idle connections that have been open for more than 1 hour. Which combination of steps should be taken?

Easy
248

Refer to the exhibit. A database engineer is assigned this IAM policy. Which of the following actions can the engineer perform? (Choose two.)

Hard
249

An e-commerce company runs a multi-AZ deployment of Amazon RDS for MySQL. During a recent failover test, the application experienced a 30-second write outage. The application uses a connection pooling library. The DB instance has a 60-second TTL for DNS records. What is the MOST likely cause of the outage?

Hard
250

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB with On-Demand capacity for a gaming application. During a new game launch, write traffic spikes 10x normal for 30 minutes. Some write requests receive ProvisionedThroughputExceeded exceptions. What is the MOST likely cause and solution?

Hard
251

A company is running an Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. The application experiences a brief write disruption during automatic failover. The database workload has low write latency requirements. Which configuration change would minimize application impact during failover?

Medium
252

A company wants to automate backups for an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance. The backup retention period should be 35 days. Which step is required?

Easy
253

A company uses Amazon ElastiCache for Redis as a caching layer for a database. The cache cluster has one primary and one replica node. During a maintenance event, the primary node fails and the replica is promoted. After promotion, the application experiences increased latency. What should a database specialist do to reduce the impact of future failovers?

Hard
254

An application is experiencing increased latency when writing to an Amazon DynamoDB table. The table uses on-demand capacity mode. The CloudWatch metric 'WriteThrottleEvents' is zero. What is the most likely cause of the increased latency?

Easy
255

A company is using Amazon Neptune to run graph queries. The cluster has one writer and two reader instances. After a major version upgrade, the query performance degrades for complex traversal queries. The database specialist suspects that the query optimizer is not using indexes effectively. Which action should the specialist take to identify the issue?

Medium
256

A database administrator notices that Amazon RDS for MySQL is experiencing high CPU utilization during peak hours. The application is read-heavy with many SELECT queries. Which action is most cost-effective to improve performance?

Easy
257

A database specialist needs to monitor the resource utilization of Amazon RDS DB instances. Which AWS service provides OS-level metrics such as memory, disk, and CPU usage?

Easy
258

Arrange the steps to switch over from a primary Amazon RDS for Oracle DB instance to a standby in a Multi-AZ deployment (planned failover) in the correct order.

Medium
259

A startup is running an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database for its web application. The database size is 50 GB. The company wants to implement a backup strategy that allows point-in-time recovery (PITR) to any point within the last 35 days with minimal storage cost. Which backup strategy should be used?

Easy
260

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB with provisioned capacity for a critical application. During a traffic spike, the table experiences throttling on write requests. The DBA needs to resolve the issue quickly. Which THREE actions should the DBA take? (Choose THREE.)

Hard
261

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with auto scaling enabled. The table's read capacity is set to a minimum of 100 and maximum of 1000 read capacity units (RCUs). The actual consumed read capacity is consistently at 200 RCUs. What should the database specialist do to optimize costs without impacting performance?

Hard
262

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with auto scaling enabled. The table's write capacity is set to a minimum of 50 and maximum of 500 write capacity units (WCUs). The actual consumed write capacity is consistently at 100 WCUs. What should the database specialist do to optimize costs without impacting performance?

Easy
263

A company has an Amazon Redshift cluster that is running slowly on complex queries. The cluster has 10 dc2.large nodes. The 'QueryDuration' metric shows high values for several queries. The team wants to improve performance without changing queries. Which action is MOST likely to help?

Medium
264

A company runs a production Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance with Multi-AZ deployment. The DB instance has a large number of connections from application servers. The operations team wants to monitor the number of database connections and receive an alert when it exceeds 80% of the maximum connections. Which combination of steps should be taken to set up this monitoring? (Choose two.)

Hard
265

A company has an Amazon DynamoDB table that stores IoT sensor data. The table has a partition key of device_id and a sort key of timestamp. The team wants to efficiently retrieve the latest reading for each device. Which query pattern should be used?

Easy
266

A company is experiencing increased latency on their Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance. The application team reports that queries are taking longer than usual. The database metrics show high CPU utilization and a spike in write operations. Which initial step should the database specialist take to diagnose the issue?

Medium
267

A database administrator is creating an IAM policy to allow a DevOps engineer to manage production RDS instances. The policy above is attached to the engineer's IAM role. The engineer reports that they cannot create a new DB instance with the identifier 'prod-analytics'. What is the most likely reason?

Medium
268

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with provisioned capacity. The table's read capacity is consistently underutilized, but the write capacity is frequently maxed out. The team wants to optimize costs while maintaining performance. Which TWO actions should be taken?

Easy
269

A company wants to automate the creation of a new Amazon RDS for SQL Server instance with specific configurations, including VPC, subnet, and security group settings. Which AWS service should be used to deploy this infrastructure as code?

Easy
270

A company is using Amazon ElastiCache for Redis as a caching layer for a high-traffic web application. The cache hit ratio has dropped from 95% to 70% after a recent deployment that changed the cache key structure. The application team wants to improve the hit ratio without increasing the cache memory. Which action should they take?

Hard
271

A company is using Amazon RDS for SQL Server with Multi-AZ and automated backups enabled. The database administrator needs to restore the database to a specific point in time that is within the retention period. What is the correct procedure?

Easy
272

A company has a production Amazon DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity. The table experiences occasional throttling due to hot partitions. The operations team wants to implement a solution to identify the specific partition keys causing the throttling. What is the MOST efficient approach?

Hard
273

A database specialist needs to capture SQL queries executed against an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster for performance analysis. The capture should have minimal performance impact and be stored in Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Which feature should the specialist use?

Easy
274

A company is running an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The database performance has degraded over time. The DBA suspects that the issue is due to a high number of connections that are in a 'sleep' state from a legacy application. What is the MOST effective solution to automatically terminate idle connections?

Medium
275

A company uses Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition. The database specialist notices that the DB cluster's failover time is longer than expected. The primary instance is using a db.r5.large instance class. Which change would most likely reduce the failover time?

Hard
276

A company runs an e-commerce platform using Amazon DynamoDB as the database. The table has a provisioned capacity of 5000 WCU and 3000 RCU. During a flash sale, the write traffic spikes to 8000 WCU for 10 minutes, causing significant throttling. The operations team notices that the table's WriteCapacityUnits metric shows 5000, but the ConsumedWriteCapacityUnits metric peaks at 4500. The application is experiencing errors and slow response times. The team wants to handle such spikes automatically without manual intervention and without over-provisioning. Which solution should be implemented?

Hard
277

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB to store IoT sensor data. Each sensor writes a record every second. The table has a partition key of 'sensor_id' and a sort key of 'timestamp'. Over time, the team notices that write performance degrades for certain sensors that generate more data. The table uses provisioned capacity with auto scaling enabled. The application uses eventual consistency. The team needs to ensure consistent write performance without throttling. Which action should be taken?

Medium
278

A company is designing a disaster recovery plan for an Amazon RDS for MySQL database. The database must have a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 5 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 1 hour. Which TWO actions should be taken? (Choose two.)

Medium
279

An IAM policy is attached to a user who needs to restore an Amazon RDS DB instance from a DB snapshot. The user attempts to restore and receives an 'Access Denied' error. Which missing permission is MOST likely causing the failure?

Easy
280

A company is migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 2 TB in size and has a high transaction rate. The migration must have minimal downtime. Which migration strategy should a database specialist recommend?

Hard
281

A database administrator notices that an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster's primary instance is experiencing high CPU utilization due to a long-running analytical query. The application can tolerate eventual consistency. What is the MOST cost-effective solution to reduce CPU load on the primary instance?

Medium
282

A company is running an Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. The company wants to implement a backup strategy that meets a recovery point objective (RPO) of 5 minutes and a recovery time objective (RTO) of 1 hour. Which THREE steps should the company take to meet these objectives?

Hard
283

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity mode. The application experiences occasional throttling during traffic spikes. The database administrator wants to implement a solution to reduce throttling. Which THREE actions should the administrator take? (Choose THREE.)

Hard
284

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity. The application experiences increased latency during peak hours. The DynamoDB table receives about 5,000 writes per second and 10,000 reads per second. The read latency is high, but write latency is acceptable. What should the company do to reduce read latency?

Easy
285

A company is running an Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. The primary instance in us-east-1a experiences an unexpected failure. After the automatic failover, the application team reports that write latency has increased significantly. The new primary instance is in us-east-1b. The DB instance class and storage configuration are identical. What is the MOST likely cause of the increased write latency?

Medium
286

A company runs a critical Amazon DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity. The table experiences throttling errors (ProvisionedThroughputExceededException) during peak hours. The table has a global secondary index (GSI) with a different partition key. What is the MOST likely cause of the throttling?

Medium
287

A company needs to audit all SQL queries executed on an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance. Which feature should the company enable?

Easy
288

Refer to the exhibit. A database engineer runs the command and receives the above output. The engineer wants to convert the database to Multi-AZ. Which command should be used?

Medium
289

A company has an Amazon DynamoDB table that stores session data for a web application. The table's read capacity units (RCUs) are consistently near 100% utilization during peak hours, causing throttling. The application can tolerate eventually consistent reads. Which action should the application team take to reduce throttling?

Easy
290

A company is using Amazon ElastiCache for Redis to cache database query results. They notice that the cache hit ratio is low and many requests are hitting the database. The 'Evictions' metric is high. What is the MOST likely cause?

Medium
291

Refer to the exhibit. An application on an EC2 instance is trying to read an object from the S3 bucket 'data-lake-prod'. The instance is in a VPC with an IP address of 10.0.1.5. The application receives an Access Denied error. What is the cause?

Hard
292

Refer to the exhibit. A database administrator is writing an IAM policy to manage Amazon RDS snapshots. The policy allows actions on all RDS resources but denies deletion of any DB instance with the prefix 'production-'. A developer attempts to delete a snapshot named 'production-snapshot-2020'. Will this action be allowed?

Medium
293

A company is running an Amazon Aurora MySQL-compatible edition DB cluster. The application reports that a recent schema change caused a significant increase in the number of deadlocks. Which parameter should the DBA check and possibly adjust to reduce deadlocks?

Easy
294

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with global tables. The company wants to monitor replication latency between regions. Which CloudWatch metric should the company use?

Medium
295

A database administrator needs to monitor the number of connections to an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. Which Amazon CloudWatch metric should be used?

Easy
296

The exhibit shows the output of an AWS CLI command for an Amazon RDS DB instance. Based on the output, what is the current configuration of the DB instance?

Medium
297

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB for a real-time analytics application. The table is provisioned with 1000 RCU and 500 WCU. Recently, the application experienced throttling on reads during a marketing campaign. The 'ConsumedReadCapacityUnits' metric shows spikes up to 2000 RCU. The 'ReadThrottleEvents' metric is high. The table has a global secondary index (GSI) that is also throttled. The application uses eventually consistent reads. The team wants to minimize costs while preventing throttling. The campaign traffic is predictable and occurs for 2 hours each day. What should the team do?

Medium
298

A database administrator needs to automate the backup process for an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The backups must be retained for 30 days and should be taken daily. Which AWS service should be used to implement this automation?

Easy
299

A company is using Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment. The database experiences a failover event, and after failover, the application reports increased latency. Which action should the database specialist take to diagnose the issue?

Medium
300

A logistics company operates a fleet tracking system using Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility). The database stores location updates from thousands of vehicles every second. The collection has a compound index on (vehicle_id, timestamp). Recently, the company noticed that write latency has increased, and the primary instance's CPU is consistently above 80%. The storage is gp2, and the instance is a db.r5.large. The operations team suspects that index maintenance is causing high CPU. The database administrator needs to reduce write latency without sacrificing query performance for real-time location queries. What should the administrator do?

Hard

Frequently asked questions

What does the Management and Operations domain cover on the DBS-C01 exam?
Management and Operations questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.
How many questions are in this domain?
This page lists all 300 Management and Operations questions in the DBS-C01 question bank. The actual exam draws from this domain proportionally to its weighting in the official exam blueprint.
What is the best way to practise this domain?
Start with a short focused session (10 questions) to identify gaps, then work through explanations. Repeat with a longer session once the weak areas feel solid.
Can I practise only Management and Operations questions?
Yes — the session launcher on this page filters questions to this domain only. Choose any session length for inline explanations and scoring.
aws-database-specialty AWS-DATABASE-SPECIALTY db mgmt ops Practice Questions