DEA-C01 Data Store Management Practice Question
A company runs a production Amazon RDS for MySQL database with Multi-AZ deployment. The database experiences high read latency during peak hours. The company wants to improve read performance with minimal application changes. Which solution should a data engineer recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Multi-AZ with read scaling, assuming the standby instance can serve reads, but in Amazon RDS for MySQL, the Multi-AZ standby is passive and cannot accept connections until failover occurs.
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 one or more read replicas in a different Availability Zone.
Creating read replicas in a different Availability Zone offloads read traffic from the primary DB instance, reducing read latency during peak hours. Read replicas in Amazon RDS for MySQL are asynchronous replicas that can serve SELECT queries, requiring minimal application changes (only a new connection endpoint). This directly addresses high read latency without altering the existing Multi-AZ setup.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Create one or more read replicas in a different Availability Zone.
Why this is correct
Read replicas offload read traffic from the primary instance.
- ✗
Use Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) as a caching layer.
Why it's wrong here
DAX is for DynamoDB, not RDS MySQL.
- ✗
Increase the DB instance size to a larger instance class.
Why it's wrong here
Scaling up may help but is more costly and doesn't offload reads as efficiently.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ on the existing instance.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ improves availability, not read performance.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This DEA-C01 question is part of Courseiva's 1,711-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
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.