DBS-C01 Workload-Specific Database Design Practice Question
A company is running a PostgreSQL database on Amazon RDS. They need to improve read performance for a reporting application that runs complex queries. The reporting application can tolerate slightly stale data. Which THREE actions should they take? (Choose three.)
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Multi-AZ with read replicas, assuming that the standby instance in a Multi-AZ deployment can serve read traffic, but in RDS for PostgreSQL, the standby is not accessible for reads until a failover occurs.
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
✓
Modify the DB parameter group to optimize settings for reporting workloads, such as increasing shared_buffers and work_mem.
Modifying the DB parameter group to increase shared_buffers and work_mem can significantly improve the performance of complex reporting queries by allowing more data to be cached in memory and larger sort operations to be performed in memory rather than on disk. Option B is correct because upgrading to a larger instance class with more vCPUs and memory directly addresses the compute and memory demands of complex queries, reducing query execution time. Option C is correct because creating read replicas offloads reporting traffic from the primary database, and since the reporting application can tolerate slightly stale data, the asynchronous replication lag is acceptable.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Modify the DB parameter group to optimize settings for reporting workloads, such as increasing shared_buffers and work_mem.
Why this is correct
Tuning PostgreSQL parameters can improve performance for complex queries.
- ✓
Upgrade the RDS instance to a larger instance class with more vCPUs and memory.
Why this is correct
More resources improve query performance.
- ✓
Create one or more read replicas of the RDS instance and direct reporting queries to them.
Why this is correct
Read replicas offload read traffic from the primary.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ on the RDS instance.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ improves availability, not read performance.
- ✗
Implement an Amazon ElastiCache cluster to cache query results.
Why it's wrong here
While caching can help, it's not an RDS action and may not cover all queries.
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