Question 1,032 of 1,660
SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A company has a centralized logging account and multiple application accounts. All VPC Flow Logs are sent to a central S3 bucket in the logging account. The security team needs to analyze the logs using Amazon Athena. The team must ensure queries are cost-effective and return results quickly for recent logs. Which configuration should be used?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Athena’s ability to query compressed formats (like Parquet) with the need for partitioning, or mistakenly believe that S3 Glacier can be queried by Athena, when in fact Athena requires objects to be in S3 Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, or Glacier Instant Retrieval (not Glacier or Glacier Deep Archive).
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 S3 bucket by date (e.g., year/month/day) and use Athena partition projection.
Partitioning the S3 bucket by date (e.g., year/month/day) and using Athena partition projection allows Athena to automatically discover and prune partitions without manual metadata management. This reduces the amount of data scanned per query, lowering costs and improving query speed for recent logs. Partition projection is serverless and eliminates the need for Glue crawlers or Hive-style partition loading, making it ideal for time-series data like VPC Flow Logs.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Convert the logs to Parquet format using AWS Glue and store them in the same bucket.
Why it's wrong here
Parquet is good but partitioning is more impactful for recent data.
- ✗
Use S3 lifecycle policies to transition logs to S3 Glacier after 7 days and query with Athena.
Why it's wrong here
Glacier is not directly queryable by Athena.
- ✓
Partition the S3 bucket by date (e.g., year/month/day) and use Athena partition projection.
Why this is correct
Correct: Partitioning reduces data scanned.
- ✗
Use Athena with federated query to scan logs directly from the application accounts.
Why it's wrong here
Cross-account queries add complexity and latency.
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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Last reviewed: Jun 11, 2026
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.
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