DBS-C01 Workload-Specific Database Design Practice Question
A startup is building a social media application that needs to store user profiles, posts, comments, and likes. The data is highly interconnected, and the team wants to query relationships efficiently, such as 'find all friends of a user who liked a post'. Which database service is best suited for this workload?
⚠ Common exam trap
The DBS-C01 exam often tests the misconception that a relational database (like PostgreSQL) can handle graph workloads efficiently via joins, but the trap is that relational databases suffer from exponential join complexity and lack native graph traversal optimizations, making Neptune the correct choice for deeply interconnected data.
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 Neptune
Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database service optimized for highly interconnected data. It supports property graph and RDF models, enabling efficient traversal of relationships such as 'find all friends of a user who liked a post' using Gremlin or SPARQL queries. This makes it the ideal choice for social media applications requiring real-time relationship queries.
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 ElastiCache for Redis
Why it's wrong here
Redis is not a primary database for persistent storage.
- ✗
Amazon DynamoDB
Why it's wrong here
DynamoDB is not optimized for graph queries.
- ✗
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
Why it's wrong here
Relational databases can model graphs but are slower for multi-hop queries.
- ✓
Amazon Neptune
Why this is correct
Neptune is a graph database built for relationship queries.
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Same concept, more angles
2 more ways this is tested on DBS-C01
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. A company is building a social network application that needs to store user profiles, friend relationships, and a feed of posts. The feed queries are complex, involving graph traversals (e.g., friends of friends). Which database is best suited for the relationship data?
easy- A.Amazon DynamoDB
- B.Amazon RDS for MySQL
- C.Amazon ElastiCache for Redis
- ✓ D.Amazon Neptune
Why D: Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database service optimized for storing and querying highly connected data. It supports both property graph and RDF models, and it uses graph traversal languages like Gremlin and SPARQL, making it ideal for complex friend-of-friend queries and social network relationship data.
Variation 2. A startup is building a social media application that requires a database to store user relationships (followers, following) and support graph queries. The data volume is expected to grow to tens of terabytes. Which AWS database service is most suitable for this workload?
easy- A.Amazon RDS for MySQL with self-joins.
- B.Amazon Redshift.
- C.Amazon DynamoDB with adjacency list design.
- ✓ D.Amazon Neptune.
Why D: Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database service optimized for storing and querying highly connected data, such as social media user relationships (followers, following). It supports both property graph and RDF models, enabling efficient graph traversal queries using Gremlin or SPARQL, which is ideal for this workload. Neptune scales to tens of terabytes and provides low-latency query performance for complex graph patterns, making it the most suitable choice.
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.