MLS-C01 Data Engineering Practice Question
A company uses Amazon RDS for its transactional database and needs to export a daily snapshot of a table to Amazon S3 in Parquet format for analytics. Which AWS service can perform this export without writing custom code?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse AWS Glue's ETL capabilities with AWS DMS's migration focus, assuming DMS can handle scheduled format conversions like Parquet, but DMS primarily deals with ongoing replication and does not natively support Parquet output without custom transformation.
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
✓
AWS Glue
AWS Glue is correct because it provides a fully managed ETL service that can natively read from Amazon RDS and write to Amazon S3 in Parquet format using a scheduled job, without requiring any custom code. Glue's built-in transform capabilities and crawlers can convert the data to columnar Parquet format efficiently for analytics workloads.
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 Redshift
Why it's wrong here
Redshift is a data warehouse, not a tool for exporting data from RDS to S3.
- ✗
AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
Why it's wrong here
DMS is for continuous replication, not scheduled exports with format conversion.
- ✗
Amazon Athena
Why it's wrong here
Athena cannot query RDS directly; it queries data in S3.
- ✓
AWS Glue
Why this is correct
Glue can run scheduled ETL jobs to extract from RDS and write to S3 in Parquet.
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 |
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This MLS-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 MLS-C01 exam.