DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
A data engineer is troubleshooting an AWS Glue job that reads from Amazon RDS MySQL and writes to Amazon S3. The job runs successfully but takes longer than expected. The engineer wants to optimize performance. Which THREE actions would improve job performance?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is that candidates might think converting to CSV improves performance due to simplicity, but in reality, Parquet's columnar storage and compression provide significant performance benefits for analytics workloads on S3.
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 DPUs allocated to the Glue job.
Increasing the number of DPUs (Data Processing Units) allocated to the AWS Glue job provides more parallel processing capacity, allowing the job to process data faster. This is a direct way to improve performance when the job is CPU or memory-bound, as Glue distributes the workload across the allocated DPUs.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Increase the number of DPUs allocated to the Glue job.
Why this is correct
More DPUs provide more parallelism.
- ✗
Use a single JDBC connection per partition.
Why it's wrong here
Single connection per partition is default; increasing may help but not as impactful as others.
- ✓
Increase the JDBC fetch size parameter.
Why this is correct
Larger fetch size reduces number of network round trips.
- ✗
Convert the output format from Parquet to CSV.
Why it's wrong here
CSV is larger and slower to write than Parquet.
- ✓
Use a pushdown predicate to filter data at the source.
Why this is correct
Reduces the amount of data transferred from RDS.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
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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.