AWS Certified Database - Specialty Practice Exam 2025: Latest Questions

A retail application uses Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. During predictable weekday peaks, the read workload spikes and the primary instance shows high CPU while application latency increases. The application issues both reads and writes from the same connection string. What is the BEST solution to scale reads and reduce load on the writer with minimal application change?

A company is migrating a large on-premises PostgreSQL database to AWS with minimal downtime. The company wants continuous replication and an automated cutover approach while keeping the source database online. Which solution BEST meets these requirements?

An operations team needs to ensure that automated backups are enabled for an Amazon RDS DB instance and that backups are encrypted at rest. Which configuration BEST satisfies this requirement?

A security team must restrict access to an Amazon RDS for MySQL instance so that only application servers in a specific VPC can connect. Which approach provides the MOST appropriate network-level control?

A document management application stores semi-structured JSON documents and needs to support ad-hoc queries on document attributes with low-latency reads. The schema evolves frequently. Which database choice is MOST appropriate?

A company is migrating from on-premises Oracle to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. The migration requires converting stored procedures and schema objects with minimal manual effort and producing an assessment report of incompatibilities before starting. Which tool BEST meets these requirements?

An Amazon DynamoDB table experiences throttling during traffic spikes. The workload is mostly reads with occasional bursts and requires consistent single-digit millisecond latency. The team wants DynamoDB to handle sudden increases without manual capacity planning. Which option BEST addresses this?

A team is investigating intermittent slow queries on an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance. They need to identify which SQL statements are consuming the most time and analyze query execution characteristics over time with minimal overhead. What should they use?

A company uses Amazon Aurora MySQL for a mission-critical workload. A compliance requirement mandates that database credentials must not be stored in application configuration files and must be rotated automatically. The application runs on Amazon ECS. Which solution BEST meets these requirements with the LEAST operational burden?

A global SaaS platform uses Amazon DynamoDB and must support active-active writes from two AWS Regions with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of near zero. The application requires conflict handling that preserves the latest update based on timestamps. Which architecture BEST meets these requirements?

A company runs an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible cluster. A developer accidentally ran a DELETE statement without a WHERE clause, and the mistake was discovered 10 minutes later. The company needs the fastest way to restore the cluster to the state just before the DELETE without restoring a full snapshot into a new environment. What should the database specialist do?

A security team must ensure that only specific application IAM roles can connect to an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance, and they want to avoid long-lived database passwords. What is the recommended approach?

A team is migrating to Amazon DynamoDB and wants to retrieve multiple items from a table efficiently using their primary keys in a single request to reduce network overhead. Which DynamoDB API operation best fits this requirement?

An application uses Amazon DynamoDB with provisioned capacity. During predictable daily peaks, the table experiences throttling and elevated latency. The workload has a known schedule and the team wants to minimize manual intervention while controlling costs. What should the database specialist recommend?

A company uses Amazon RDS for MySQL. After enabling Multi-AZ, the primary instance shows increased write latency. Performance Insights indicates longer commit times. The application recently began performing synchronous writes for every transaction. What is the most likely cause and best mitigation?

A database specialist must migrate a large on-premises Oracle database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible. The migration requires converting stored procedures and application SQL that uses Oracle-specific syntax. The company wants to estimate conversion effort and automate as much as possible. What should the specialist use?

A team wants to use Amazon RDS for SQL Server with Transparent Data Encryption (TDE). The security policy requires centralized control over encryption keys, auditability, and the ability to revoke key usage if necessary. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A company is building a multi-tenant SaaS that stores time-series device events. Tenants frequently query the latest events for a device, and occasionally query a time range for analytics. The solution must scale with high write throughput and provide millisecond reads for recent data. Which design is most appropriate?

An Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible cluster experiences sporadic CPU spikes and slow queries after a deployment. The team suspects a parameter group change introduced a regression, but they need evidence of which SQL statements changed behavior and which waits dominate during the spikes. What should the database specialist do to identify the root cause with the most detail?

A financial services company must enable cross-Region disaster recovery for an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance with minimal data loss and automated failover procedures. They need encryption, controlled network access, and the ability to promote the DR copy during a Region outage. What is the best solution?

A company runs Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and needs to enforce least-privilege access for analysts. Analysts must be able to query only a subset of columns in a table that contains sensitive PII, and the restriction must be enforced within the database (not just in the application). What is the BEST approach?

A team is migrating an on-premises Oracle data warehouse to AWS. The target is Amazon Redshift. The team needs the fastest way to load several terabytes of historical data into Redshift with minimal impact on the source system during business hours. Which approach should the team choose?

An application uses Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity. During peak events, some writes fail with throttling errors and the CloudWatch metric ConsumedWriteCapacityUnits is near the account-level limit. The table is not using a customer-managed KMS key. What should a database specialist do FIRST to remediate?

A company runs Amazon Aurora MySQL for an ecommerce application. Read traffic is highly variable and occasionally overwhelms the reader endpoints. The company wants to automatically add and remove reader capacity with minimal operational overhead and without changing application code significantly. Which solution is MOST appropriate?

A financial services company must ensure that all queries against an Amazon Redshift cluster are auditable, including which user ran which SQL statements and from what client host. Logs must be retained centrally and protected from modification. What is the BEST solution?