SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A company has a central logging account that receives VPC Flow Logs, CloudTrail logs, and AWS Config logs from all accounts in the organization. The logs are stored in S3 buckets. The security team wants to analyze these logs using Amazon Athena. What is the MOST cost-effective way to ensure that the Athena queries only scan the necessary data?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse performance optimization (e.g., compression, indexes) with cost optimization (reducing data scanned), and they may overlook that partition pruning is the primary mechanism to minimize Athena query costs, not just speed up queries.
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
✓
Partition the data by account ID, region, and date in the S3 bucket, and use partitions in Athena.
Partitioning the S3 data by account ID, region, and date allows Athena to use partition pruning, which limits the amount of data scanned to only the relevant partitions based on query filters. This directly reduces query cost because Athena charges per amount of data scanned, and partitioning is the most effective way to minimize scanned data without additional compression or indexing overhead.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Partition the data by account ID, region, and date in the S3 bucket, and use partitions in Athena.
Why this is correct
Partition pruning ensures Athena scans only relevant partitions.
- ✗
Use S3 object-level compression (e.g., gzip) to reduce data volume.
Why it's wrong here
Compression reduces storage but does not reduce the amount of data scanned if partitions are not used.
- ✗
Create AWS Glue partition indexes on the table.
Why it's wrong here
Partition indexes are for faster partition retrieval, not for limiting scan size.
- ✗
Create separate Athena tables for each account and region.
Why it's wrong here
This increases maintenance and query complexity.
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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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAP-C02 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 SAP-C02 exam.