DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
A company is migrating its on-premises data warehouse to Amazon Redshift. The daily batch load from the source database takes 6 hours using a single-node Redshift cluster. The engineer needs to reduce load time to under 2 hours without increasing cost significantly. Which strategy should the engineer adopt?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often assume compression or network optimizations are the primary bottleneck, when in reality the single-node Redshift cluster's lack of parallelism is the root cause of the slow load time.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Increase the number of nodes in the Redshift cluster and use parallel COPY from multiple files.
Increasing the number of nodes in the Redshift cluster provides more compute and I/O capacity, and using parallel COPY from multiple files allows Redshift to automatically split the load across the node slices, dramatically reducing load time. This approach scales performance linearly with the number of nodes, enabling the engineer to meet the sub-2-hour target without significantly increasing cost if the cluster is sized appropriately.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use COPY with compression (gzip) to reduce data volume.
Why it's wrong here
Compression helps storage but not load time significantly.
- ✗
Use a VPC endpoint to improve network throughput to S3.
Why it's wrong here
Network improvements are marginal; parallelism is key.
- ✗
Change the table distribution style to EVEN to distribute data evenly.
Why it's wrong here
Distribution style affects query performance, not load speed.
- ✓
Increase the number of nodes in the Redshift cluster and use parallel COPY from multiple files.
Why this is correct
More nodes enable parallel data loading.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DEA-C01 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the DEA-C01 exam.