DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question

A data engineer must ingest a 4 TB Oracle database into Amazon S3 nightly. The database is on-premises and the network link supports only 200 Mbps. The engineer wants to minimize the total transfer time and avoid impacting production. Which approach should the engineer use?

⚠ Common exam trap

The trap here is assuming that an online acceleration service like S3 Transfer Acceleration or DataSync can overcome a slow origin uplink, when the bottleneck is the on-premises network itself.

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

✓

Use AWS Snowball Edge devices to transfer the data offline and import into Amazon S3.

For multi-terabyte datasets and limited bandwidth, offline transfer with AWS Snowball Edge is the recommended approach. It bypasses the network bottleneck, reduces transfer time, and avoids impacting production systems. Online methods like DMS, DataSync, or S3 Transfer Acceleration are constrained by the available bandwidth and are not optimal for this volume.

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

✗
Use Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration with multipart uploads from an on-premises script.
Why it's wrong here
S3 Transfer Acceleration speeds up uploads over the public internet by routing through AWS edge locations, but it cannot overcome a 200 Mbps origin uplink. The bottleneck is the on-premises network, not the path to AWS. For 4 TB, this would still take too long and compete with production traffic.
✗
Use AWS DataSync with an on-premises agent to transfer the data over the internet.
Why it's wrong here
AWS DataSync is optimized for online transfer and can accelerate it with parallel streams, but it is still limited by the 200 Mbps network link. For 4 TB, the transfer would take many hours and could impact production traffic. DataSync is better for smaller datasets or when a dedicated high-bandwidth connection exists.
✓
Use AWS Snowball Edge devices to transfer the data offline and import into Amazon S3.
Why this is correct
AWS Snowball Edge is designed for large-scale offline data transfer. With 4 TB and a 200 Mbps link, online transfer would take roughly 44 hours or more. Snowball Edge can copy the data locally and ship it, avoiding the network bottleneck entirely. This minimizes transfer time and avoids saturating the production link.
✗
Use AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) with a replication instance and an S3 target endpoint.
Why it's wrong here
AWS DMS can replicate from Oracle to Amazon S3, but a 4 TB transfer over a 200 Mbps link still takes many hours or days, and DMS replication instances add cost. DMS is suitable for ongoing change data capture, not for one-time bulk migration of this size. The network bottleneck remains, so it does not minimize transfer time effectively.

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

DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question

Why each option matters

Option-by-option breakdown

AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison

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