DBS-C01 Monitoring and Troubleshooting Practice Question
A company is using Amazon Redshift for data warehousing. The query performance has degraded over time. The DBA suspects that the distribution style of large tables is suboptimal. Which Redshift system view should be queried to identify distribution skew?
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
✓
SVV_DISKUSAGE
SVV_DISKUSAGE provides disk usage per slice, which helps identify distribution skew. Option A is wrong because STL_SCAN provides details about scan operations, not skew. Option B is wrong because PG_TABLE_DEF shows table definitions, not skew. Option D is wrong because STV_TBL_PERM shows storage usage per table but not per slice, making it less suitable for skew analysis.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
STL_SCAN
Why it's wrong here
STL_SCAN provides details about scan operations, not distribution skew.
- ✗
PG_TABLE_DEF
Why it's wrong here
PG_TABLE_DEF shows table definitions, not distribution skew.
- ✓
SVV_DISKUSAGE
Why this is correct
SVV_DISKUSAGE provides disk usage per slice, which helps identify distribution skew.
- ✗
STV_TBL_PERM
Why it's wrong here
STV_TBL_PERM provides physical storage metadata for permanent tables, such as block counts and row counts per slice, but it does not expose the distribution key column or the percentage of rows stored on each node. Distribution skew is identified by comparing row counts across slices using STV_SLICES and STV_TBL_PERM joined with SVV_DISKLAYOUT or by querying SVV_TABLE_INFO, which directly reports skew ratio. It is tempting because STV_TBL_PERM can show raw data distribution across slices, and in a scenario where you need to verify actual row counts per slice for a specific table, it would be the correct choice.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DBS-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 DBS-C01 exam.