DEA-C01 Data Store Management Practice Question
A company is running a production database on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The database experiences high read traffic from multiple application servers. Which data store management strategy would reduce the load on the primary database instance?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Multi-AZ (which is for failover, not read scaling) with Read Replicas, or they assume ElastiCache is the only caching option, overlooking that RDS Read Replicas are a managed, database-level solution for read offloading without application code changes.
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
✓
Create an RDS Read Replica in the same region.
Creating an RDS Read Replica in the same region offloads read-heavy traffic from the primary PostgreSQL instance by providing a separate, read-only copy of the database. Application servers can direct SELECT queries to the Read Replica, reducing the primary instance's CPU and I/O load without affecting write performance. This is the most direct and cost-effective strategy for scaling read capacity in Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Enable DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) for the database.
Why it's wrong here
DAX is for DynamoDB, not PostgreSQL.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ deployment for automatic failover.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ provides high availability but does not offload read traffic.
- ✓
Create an RDS Read Replica in the same region.
Why this is correct
Read Replicas allow offloading read queries, reducing load on the primary.
- ✗
Use Amazon ElastiCache to cache query results.
Why it's wrong here
ElastiCache is a caching service, not a replica; it may help but is not a read replica.
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