C100DBA Sharding Practice Question
An organization wants to restrict customer data for European Union residents to a specific set of physical servers located in Frankfurt, complying with data residency regulations. Which MongoDB sharding feature should the DBA implement to achieve this?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates confuse standard sharding with zone sharding, failing to realize that zone tags are strictly required to restrict data to specific physical servers for compliance.
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
✓
Zone sharding, which associates specific shard key ranges with designated groups of shards to enforce data residency rules.
Zone sharding allows administrators to associate specific shard key ranges with defined sets of shards called zones. By tagging European servers into an 'EU' zone and associating the region shard key range with that zone, MongoDB guarantees that EU customer data stays exclusively on those designated physical shards. This is critical for regulatory compliance and data sovereignty requirements.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Zone sharding, which associates specific shard key ranges with designated groups of shards to enforce data residency rules.
Why this is correct
Zone sharding, which associates specific shard key ranges with designated groups of shards to enforce data residency rules. Zone sharding enables administrators to map document ranges to specific physical shards, ensuring data partitions remain confined to designated geographical locations.
- ✗
Dynamic range compression, which encrypts and confines specific database collections to localized storage volumes on individual nodes.
Why it's wrong here
Dynamic range compression is not a MongoDB sharding feature; no such mechanism confines collections to nodes. Zone sharding achieves residency by mapping shard key ranges to tagged zones. The described encryption-and-confinement behaviour does not exist in MongoDB, so it cannot satisfy the Frankfurt restriction.
- ✗
Global cluster replication, which synchronizes all database documents simultaneously across every shard in every continent.
Why it's wrong here
Global cluster replication copies every document to shards worldwide, directly violating the Frankfurt-only residency requirement. Zone sharding, by tagging shards to zones and associating the EU range with Frankfurt, confines data geographically. Global replication would be correct for worldwide read latency, not regulatory data confinement.
- ✗
Read preference tagging, which routes read operations to secondary members in specific data centers without altering write locations.
Why it's wrong here
Read preference tagging, which routes read operations to secondary members in specific data centers without altering write locations. Read preferences only direct where read queries execute and do not enforce where documents are written or stored across sharded clusters.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official MongoDB exam blueprint
This C100DBA practice question is part of Courseiva's free MongoDB 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 C100DBA exam.