DBS-C01 Workload-Specific Database Design Practice Question
A financial services company runs a core banking application on Amazon RDS for MySQL. They need to maintain a full audit trail of all changes to customer account balances for regulatory compliance. The audit trail must be immutable and queryable for up to 7 years. Which solution meets these requirements with minimal impact on the source database?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse binary logging (binlog) replication with a compliant audit trail, but binlog is designed for replication and point-in-time recovery, not for immutable, queryable long-term storage, and streaming it to S3 via DMS is not a supported AWS service integration.
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
✓
Migrate to Amazon Aurora MySQL and enable database activity streams, streaming to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and then to Amazon S3
Amazon Aurora MySQL Database Activity Streams provide a near-real-time, immutable audit trail of database activities at the transaction level, which can be streamed to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and then stored in Amazon S3 for long-term queryable retention. This solution meets the 7-year compliance requirement with minimal impact on the source database because it offloads the audit processing to external services and does not require changes to the application or additional logging overhead on the database instance.
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 Amazon RDS Performance Insights to capture SQL queries and store them in Amazon S3
Why it's wrong here
Performance Insights provides performance data, not a full audit trail of changes.
- ✗
Use Amazon DynamoDB Streams with a Lambda function to capture changes from the MySQL database
Why it's wrong here
DynamoDB Streams are for DynamoDB tables, not for capturing changes from an external MySQL database.
- ✗
Enable binary logging on the RDS instance and stream the binlog to Amazon S3 using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
Why it's wrong here
Binary logs are not designed for long-term immutable audit; they are for replication and point-in-time recovery.
- ✓
Migrate to Amazon Aurora MySQL and enable database activity streams, streaming to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and then to Amazon S3
Why this is correct
Aurora database activity streams provide an immutable, near real-time feed of database activities that can be consumed via Kinesis.
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
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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.