DBS-C01 Workload-Specific Database Design Practice Question
A financial services company needs a relational database with high availability and automatic failover across three Availability Zones in us-east-1. The workload consists of OLTP transactions with occasional analytic queries. Which database solution meets these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse RDS Multi-AZ (which only supports 2 AZs) with Aurora's native multi-AZ replication across 3 AZs, or they mistakenly think DynamoDB global tables (a NoSQL service) can replace a relational database for OLTP workloads requiring ACID transactions.
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
✓
Amazon Aurora MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment across 3 AZs
Amazon Aurora MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment across 3 AZs meets the requirements because Aurora automatically replicates your data six ways across three Availability Zones, with a primary DB instance in one AZ and two read replicas in the other two AZs. In the event of a failure, Aurora automatically fails over to a read replica in under 30 seconds without data loss, providing high availability and automatic failover across three AZs. Aurora also supports both OLTP transactions and can handle occasional analytic queries via Aurora Replicas or Aurora Global Database for read scaling.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ (2 AZs)
Why it's wrong here
RDS Multi-AZ only supports 2 AZs, not 3.
- ✗
Amazon DynamoDB global tables
Why it's wrong here
DynamoDB is NoSQL, not relational.
- ✓
Amazon Aurora MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment across 3 AZs
Why this is correct
Aurora provides automatic failover across 3 AZs and supports OLTP and analytics.
- ✗
Amazon Redshift with cross-region snapshots
Why it's wrong here
Redshift is for analytics, not OLTP, and cross-region snapshots do not provide automatic failover.
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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.