DBS-C01 Management and Operations Practice Question
A company uses Amazon DynamoDB for a gaming application. During a new game launch, the application experiences high latency and throttling on a table with a partition key of 'user_id' and a sort key of 'timestamp'. The access pattern is to query recent items for a given user. Which TWO design changes can improve performance?
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 a composite key with 'game_id' as partition key and 'timestamp' as sort key.
Using a composite key with 'game_id' as partition key and 'timestamp' as sort key distributes traffic more evenly if 'game_id' has high cardinality, reducing hot partitions. Option C is correct because adding a Global Secondary Index (GSI) with a different partition key allows queries to be served from the index, offloading read traffic from the base table. Option A is incorrect because strongly consistent reads do not solve hot partition issues and consume more throughput. Option D is incorrect because increasing read capacity does not address the root cause of a hot partition; the table may still throttle requests to the hot partition. Option E is incorrect because DAX is a caching layer for reads, not writes, and does not resolve partition-level throttling.
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 strongly consistent reads for all queries.
Why it's wrong here
Strongly consistent reads consume more capacity and don't fix partitioning.
- ✓
Use a composite key with 'game_id' as partition key and 'timestamp' as sort key.
Why this is correct
A better partition key (game_id) can distribute writes evenly.
- ✓
Add a Global Secondary Index (GSI) with a different partition key.
Why this is correct
A GSI can distribute read/write load across partitions.
- ✗
Increase the provisioned read capacity for the table.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing RCU doesn't address hot partition issues.
- ✗
Enable DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to cache write operations.
Why it's wrong here
DAX does not cache writes.
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