DBS-C01 Workload-Specific Database Design Practice Question
A financial services company runs a critical application on Amazon RDS for Oracle. The workload is write-heavy with frequent small transactions. The DBA notices high latency during peak hours. Which design change would best address this?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse high latency with a read performance issue and incorrectly choose a read replica or caching, when the problem is actually a write I/O bottleneck that requires a storage-level solution like Provisioned IOPS.
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
✓
Switch to Provisioned IOPS (io1 or io2) volume type
The workload is write-heavy with frequent small transactions, and high latency during peak hours indicates that the current storage volume is not meeting the IOPS demands. Provisioned IOPS (io1 or io2) volumes provide consistent, low-latency performance by guaranteeing a specific number of IOPS, which directly addresses the bottleneck caused by insufficient I/O capacity for write-intensive operations.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Implement ElastiCache for Redis
Why it's wrong here
Does not directly improve write latency to the database.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ deployment
Why it's wrong here
Improves availability, not write latency.
- ✓
Switch to Provisioned IOPS (io1 or io2) volume type
Why this is correct
Provides predictable high IOPS for write-heavy workloads.
- ✗
Add a read replica
Why it's wrong here
Read replicas help read scaling, not write performance.
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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.