DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
An e-commerce company uses AWS Glue to process clickstream data from its website. The data is stored in Amazon S3 in partitioned Parquet format by date and hour. A recent increase in traffic has caused the Glue job to fail with 'Java heap space' errors. The job runs with 10 DPUs and uses Spark's default configurations. The data engineer needs to resolve the memory issue without modifying the ETL script. What should the data engineer do?
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 Spark configuration 'spark.sql.shuffle.partitions' to 500.
Increasing 'spark.sql.shuffle.partitions' to 500 reduces the amount of data handled per partition during shuffle operations, which alleviates memory pressure and prevents 'Java heap space' errors. This is a configuration change that does not require modifying the ETL script. Option A is wrong because decreasing partitions increases data per partition, worsening memory issues. Option B is wrong because changing worker type to G.1X (which has more memory per executor) might help but does not address the root cause if the issue is due to too few shuffle partitions; it is also not a direct fix for shuffle memory. Option D is wrong because increasing DPUs adds more executors but does not solve the per-executor memory issue caused by large shuffle partitions.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Decrease the Spark configuration 'spark.sql.shuffle.partitions' to 50.
Why it's wrong here
Fewer partitions increase data per partition, worsening memory issues.
- ✗
Change the worker type to G.1X.
Why it's wrong here
G.1X is the default; it may not solve the shuffle memory issue.
- ✓
Increase the Spark configuration 'spark.sql.shuffle.partitions' to 500.
Why this is correct
More shuffle partitions reduce the size of data per partition, mitigating memory issues.
- ✗
Increase the number of DPUs to 20.
Why it's wrong here
More DPUs add more executors, but the heap space issue may still occur in each executor.
Visual reference
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
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.