DEA-C01 Data Store Management Practice Question
A data engineer manages an Amazon Redshift cluster that experiences performance degradation during peak hours due to concurrent long-running queries and short ad-hoc queries competing for resources. The engineer wants to isolate the workloads so that short queries are not blocked by long-running ones, and to ensure that each workload gets a guaranteed share of memory and CPU. Which Redshift feature should the engineer implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Concurrency Scaling or SQA with workload isolation; these features improve performance for certain query types but do not provide dedicated resource queues.
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
✓
Workload Management (WLM) with query queues
Workload Management (WLM) enables the creation of separate query queues with configurable memory and concurrency, allowing isolation of long-running and short ad-hoc queries. This ensures that short queries are not blocked and that each workload receives a guaranteed share of resources. Other features like Concurrency Scaling, SQA, and Redshift Spectrum do not provide the same level of workload isolation.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Redshift Spectrum
Why it's wrong here
Redshift Spectrum allows querying data directly from Amazon S3 without loading it into Redshift tables. It does not provide workload isolation or resource management within the cluster. While it can offload some processing to Spectrum nodes, it does not address the competition between concurrent queries for cluster resources.
- ✓
Workload Management (WLM) with query queues
Why this is correct
WLM allows defining multiple query queues with different memory and concurrency settings. By configuring separate queues for long-running and short ad-hoc queries, the engineer can isolate workloads, ensuring that short queries are not blocked by long ones and that each queue gets a guaranteed share of resources. This directly addresses the scenario.
- ✗
Short Query Acceleration (SQA)
Why it's wrong here
SQA prioritizes short-running queries by running them in a dedicated space, but it does not allow the engineer to define separate queues with guaranteed resource shares for different workloads. It is a feature that automatically speeds up short queries, but it does not provide the workload isolation and resource guarantees that WLM does.
- ✗
Concurrency Scaling
Why it's wrong here
Concurrency Scaling automatically adds transient clusters to handle bursts of concurrent queries, but it does not provide workload isolation or guarantee resource allocation for different query types. It helps with concurrency limits but does not separate long and short queries into distinct queues with dedicated resources.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Amazon Web Services exam blueprint
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.