PAS-C01 Technology Practice Question
A company wants to migrate an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 2 TB in size and has a 10 Gbps network connection to AWS. The migration must have minimal downtime. Which AWS service should be used for the initial data load?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often choose Snowball Edge for large datasets without considering the minimal downtime requirement, forgetting that physical shipping introduces hours or days of latency and cannot provide ongoing replication, while DMS with CDC is the only option that keeps the source online during migration.
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 Database Migration Service (DMS) with ongoing replication.
AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) with ongoing replication is the correct choice because it supports a full load of the 2 TB Oracle database followed by continuous change data capture (CDC) to keep the target RDS instance synchronized with minimal downtime. The 10 Gbps network connection is sufficient for the initial load, and DMS handles schema conversion, data validation, and resumable transfers natively, making it ideal for a near-zero-downtime migration.
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 S3 Transfer Acceleration to upload the database dump, then restore to RDS.
Why it's wrong here
This requires taking the source offline to create a dump, causing downtime.
- ✓
AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) with ongoing replication.
Why this is correct
DMS supports full load plus change data capture (CDC) for minimal downtime.
- ✗
AWS Storage Gateway to replicate the database files to Amazon S3, then restore to RDS.
Why it's wrong here
Storage Gateway is not designed for database migration; it replicates files, not database transactions.
- ✗
AWS Snowball Edge to ship the data physically, then import to RDS.
Why it's wrong here
Snowball is for large data volumes over slow networks, but it does not support ongoing replication and adds latency.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PAS-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 PAS-C01 exam.