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SAA-C03 Practice Question 88: Redshift Data Warehouse

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 9 · question 8 of 10

Analyticseasy

A retailer's analysts run dashboards that join five years of sales, inventory and customer tables, about 40 TB in total, with heavy aggregations, all day, from a business intelligence tool that speaks SQL. Queries run continuously during business hours and must return in seconds. The current Amazon RDS instance can no longer keep up.

Which service should the data platform be built on?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • B. Amazon Redshift, loaded from the operational systems

Redshift is AWS's fully managed, petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse, and AWS states that regardless of the size of the dataset it offers fast query performance using the same SQL-based tools and business intelligence applications you already use. That is the workload described: large multi-table joins and aggregations over tens of terabytes, driven by a BI tool, running continuously. A warehouse is the right shape of system for it, rather than a bigger transactional database.

Option A is a key-value and document database. DynamoDB has no joins and no aggregate functions, so every dashboard query would have to be reimplemented as application code, and an index per access pattern does not change that.

Option C scales reads of an OLTP engine. Readers help with many small concurrent queries, but each reader still executes the analytic query row by row with the same engine, so a 40 TB aggregation does not become a seconds-long query by adding replicas.

Option D caches results rather than computing them faster. The first run of each query still has to complete on RDS, and dashboards that slice data along changing dimensions produce mostly cache misses.

Reference: What is Amazon Redshift?

Practice Test 9 ›

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