DA0-002 Data Acquisition and Preparation Practice Question
A data engineer is designing an ETL pipeline to extract sales data from a legacy on-premise database and load it into a cloud data warehouse. The database is slow and queries during business hours affect performance. Which extraction strategy minimizes impact?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse 'log shipping' (a high-availability technique) with 'Change Data Capture' (an extraction method), or assume that any periodic query (like hourly SELECT *) is acceptable without considering the cumulative performance impact on a slow legacy database.
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
✓
Incremental extraction using Change Data Capture (CDC)
Incremental extraction using Change Data Capture (CDC) minimizes impact on the legacy on-premise database by reading only the changed rows (inserts, updates, deletes) from transaction logs or change tables, rather than issuing heavy SELECT queries. This avoids full table scans or frequent queries during business hours, preserving database performance for operational 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.
- ✗
Query the database with SELECT * every hour
Why it's wrong here
Frequent full queries overload the database and worsen performance impact.
- ✓
Incremental extraction using Change Data Capture (CDC)
Why this is correct
CDC minimizes database load by extracting only changed data, reducing performance impact.
- ✗
Full table extraction nightly
Why it's wrong here
Nightly full extraction still consumes significant resources and may not be incremental enough.
- ✗
Use a database log shipping
Why it's wrong here
Log shipping is for replication, not typically for ETL extraction, and may not be suitable for incremental loading.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DA0-002 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA 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 DA0-002 exam.