DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
A small startup is building a data pipeline to ingest customer orders from a web application into Amazon Redshift for analytics. The orders are written to an Amazon RDS MySQL database. The startup wants to replicate the orders to Redshift in near-real time (within 5 minutes) with minimal operational overhead. The data volume is low, averaging 100 new orders per minute. The startup has a single data engineer who is also responsible for other tasks. What is the simplest solution?
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 Database Migration Service (DMS) with continuous replication
AWS DMS can continuously replicate from MySQL to Redshift with minimal setup and low overhead. Option A (AWS Glue) is batch-oriented and may not meet the 5-minute latency. Option B (Amazon EMR) is overkill for low data volumes. Option C (AWS Lambda) requires custom code and may not efficiently handle the replication.
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 AWS Glue with a scheduled job every 5 minutes to copy data from MySQL to Redshift
Why it's wrong here
Glue jobs have startup overhead and may not be cost-effective for low volume.
- ✗
Use Amazon EMR with Spark streaming to read from MySQL and write to Redshift
Why it's wrong here
Overly complex and expensive for the volume.
- ✗
Use an AWS Lambda function to query MySQL every minute and insert into Redshift
Why it's wrong here
Requires custom code and handling of state.
- ✓
Use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) with continuous replication
Why this is correct
DMS is purpose-built for database replication and easy to set up.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every DEA-C01 question from scratch — 1,711 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or 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.