DEA-C01 Data Operations and Support Practice Question

Correct answer & explanation

Creating a global secondary index (GSI) on the attributes used in the reporting queries allows the reporting application to use Query operations instead of expensive Scan operations. This reduces the read capacity consumption and avoids partition-level throttling, which is the cause of the 'ProvisionedThroughputExceededException' errors. On-demand tables have per-partition throughput limits, and frequent Scans can exceed those limits. Option A is incorrect because increasing the maximum read capacity via AWS Support is not applicable to on-demand tables; on-demand scaling is automatic but per-partition limits still apply. Option B is incorrect because switching to provisioned capacity would require careful capacity planning and would likely increase costs compared to using a GSI. Option C is incorrect because DAX can cache data and reduce read load, but it does not eliminate the inefficiency of Scan operations; the root cause is the Scan itself, which can be avoided by using a GSI to enable efficient queries.