50 AWS Certified Database - Specialty Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

A retail application uses Amazon DynamoDB to store shopping cart items keyed by customerId (partition key) and createdAt (sort key). The application must retrieve the most recent cart items for a customer with minimal latency. Which design is the MOST appropriate?

A company wants to migrate an on-premises PostgreSQL database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with minimal downtime. The company needs continuous replication during the cutover window. Which approach should the company use?

An application uses Amazon RDS for MySQL. The database must store credentials and rotate them automatically without application code changes. Which solution meets this requirement with the LEAST operational overhead?

A team observes elevated CPU on an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance. They need to identify the most expensive SQL statements with minimal effort. What should they use?

A company runs Amazon Aurora MySQL. Read traffic spikes unpredictably, and the application experiences read bottlenecks. The company wants to offload reads with minimal application changes and fast failover. Which solution is BEST?

A financial services company must ensure all Amazon RDS for Oracle backups are encrypted and that encryption keys are managed with strict access controls and auditing. Which approach meets these requirements?

An e-commerce company needs sub-millisecond reads for product catalog data and can tolerate eventual consistency. The catalog changes infrequently but must survive a full Region outage. Which design is MOST appropriate?

A team is migrating a large, business-critical database to Amazon Aurora. During testing, they notice the migration takes too long because full load saturates the network link. They still need near-zero downtime at cutover. What should they do?

An Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL cluster experiences intermittent commit latency spikes. CloudWatch shows stable CPU and memory, but application latency correlates with periods of high lock contention. What is the BEST next step to pinpoint the root cause?

A healthcare company runs Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. Regulatory requirements mandate that only approved IAM principals can connect to the database and that long-lived database passwords must not be used. The application runs on Amazon ECS tasks. Which solution BEST meets these requirements?

A company runs a PostgreSQL workload on Amazon RDS. They need to enforce that all connections use TLS and that the database only accepts IAM-based authentication for application users (no stored passwords). Which solution meets these requirements with the least operational overhead?

A team is designing a DynamoDB table for an event-ingestion service that must support two access patterns: (1) fetch all events for a given customer in time order, and (2) fetch the most recent event for a given device ID. Which table design best supports both patterns with minimal additional infrastructure?

A company uses Amazon Aurora with read replicas. They want to reduce the operational effort of scaling read capacity during seasonal peaks while keeping writes stable. Which approach is recommended?

A company is migrating a large on-premises Oracle database to AWS with minimal downtime. They can accept a brief cutover window, but they must continuously replicate ongoing changes during the migration. Which migration approach best meets these requirements?

An application uses Amazon RDS for MySQL. During peak traffic, user sessions report intermittent slow queries. CloudWatch shows normal CPU and memory, but the DB experiences periodic spikes in read latency. The storage is General Purpose SSD. Which action is the MOST appropriate first step to identify the root cause?

A company must provide analysts with SQL access to query JSON-formatted application logs stored in Amazon S3. The solution must be serverless and avoid loading the data into a database first. Which solution best meets these requirements?

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity. A new feature causes a sudden increase in write traffic, and DynamoDB returns ProvisionedThroughputExceededException for some requests. The team confirms it is not a hot partition. Which change will MOST directly improve application success rates without sacrificing durability?

A company needs to store sensitive customer PII in Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. Security requires encryption at rest, encryption in transit, and the ability to audit which IAM principals accessed the database configuration and snapshots. Which combination of controls best meets these requirements?

A global application uses Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. Users in multiple Regions experience high read latency when accessing reports, but write operations must remain in a single primary Region for consistency. The company wants the fastest possible local reads in each Region and rapid recovery from a regional outage. Which architecture best meets these requirements?

A company runs a high-throughput Amazon RDS for SQL Server workload. A nightly batch job causes severe blocking and deadlocks, impacting an OLTP application. The team needs to identify the specific wait types, blocking sessions, and the SQL statements involved during the job window with minimal performance impact. Which approach is MOST appropriate?

A company runs Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL for an OLTP application. During an incident, a developer accidentally ran a DELETE statement without a WHERE clause. The company needs the fastest way to restore the database to a specific time just before the mistake with minimal operational effort. What should the database specialist do?

A database specialist needs to migrate an on-premises Oracle database to AWS with minimal downtime. Ongoing changes must be replicated until cutover. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A company uses Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The security team requires all client connections to use TLS and wants the database to reject any non-encrypted connections. What is the recommended solution?

A workload stores product catalog data in Amazon DynamoDB. The application frequently queries items by "category" and sorts results by "createdAt". The current design uses a table with partition key "productId" and requires scanning to satisfy the query. What is the best design change to improve query performance without scanning?

An Amazon RDS for MySQL instance shows increased CPU utilization and a rise in disk read IOPS during business hours. The top SQL statements in Performance Insights indicate many similar SELECT queries differing only by literal values. Which action will most likely reduce CPU and disk reads?

A company uses Amazon Aurora MySQL. The application has heavy read traffic and occasional spikes cause increased read latency on the writer instance. The company wants to scale reads with minimal application changes and avoid impacting writes. What should the database specialist recommend?

A security team requires centralized credential management for an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. Applications run on Amazon ECS and must retrieve credentials securely with automatic rotation and no hardcoding in task definitions. Which solution best meets these requirements?

An on-premises PostgreSQL database uses logical replication slots for downstream consumers. During a migration to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL using AWS DMS with CDC, the DMS task starts lagging and the source database storage grows rapidly. The team observes that WAL files are not being recycled. What is the most likely cause and the best corrective action?

A company must store payment transaction data with strict audit requirements. The security team needs cryptographic assurance that database activity logs cannot be altered after delivery, and logs must be queryable for investigations. The workload uses Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. Which solution best meets these requirements?

A company is designing a multi-Region disaster recovery strategy for Amazon DynamoDB with an RPO of seconds and an RTO of minutes. The solution must support active-active reads and writes in two Regions and handle write conflicts. Which approach should the database specialist recommend?

A company uses Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition. A microservice running in AWS Lambda occasionally exhausts the database connection limit during traffic spikes, causing errors. The company wants to reduce connection overhead without changing application logic significantly. What should they do?

A security team requires that credentials for an Amazon RDS for MySQL database are not stored in application configuration files and are rotated automatically. The application runs on Amazon ECS. Which approach best meets these requirements with the least operational overhead?

An application stores session data in Amazon DynamoDB. The primary access pattern is GetItem by sessionId, but the application also needs to automatically expire sessions after 24 hours without running a cleanup job. Which DynamoDB feature should be used?

A team needs to migrate an on-premises PostgreSQL database to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The database is several terabytes, and the business can tolerate a short downtime during cutover but wants minimal custom scripting. Which approach is the MOST appropriate?

A company runs a multi-AZ Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance. After a recent change, write latency increased. CloudWatch shows high ReadIOPS and a high buffer cache hit ratio, while WriteIOPS is normal. The workload writes small rows but reads large ranges for reporting queries. What is the BEST next step to reduce impact on the primary workload?

An organization must enforce that all connections to an Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible cluster are encrypted in transit, and clients must present a trusted certificate chain. Which configuration BEST meets this requirement?

A company needs to migrate from an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. They want to minimize code changes and identify incompatible schema objects and SQL constructs early. Which AWS service should they use FIRST to assess the migration effort?

A SaaS application stores customer data in a single Amazon DynamoDB table. Each customer must be limited to 200 read capacity units and 100 write capacity units to prevent noisy-neighbor issues. The company wants a solution that does not require separate tables per tenant. What should they use?

A financial services company uses Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and must ensure that database administrators cannot read sensitive columns (for example, national IDs) in plaintext, while the application can. The company also wants the ability to rotate encryption keys without re-encrypting the entire database volume. Which solution BEST meets these requirements?

An online gaming company uses Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL for transactional writes and needs near-real-time analytics in Amazon Redshift with minimal impact on the OLTP workload. The analytics team needs continuous ingestion of changes (inserts/updates/deletes). Which approach is MOST appropriate?

A team uses Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. They want the database credentials rotated automatically without application code changes. The application runs on Amazon ECS and retrieves credentials at runtime. Which approach meets these requirements with the least operational effort?

A company is migrating a MySQL database to Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition with minimal downtime. They need continuous replication from the source during migration and a controlled cutover. Which AWS service is best suited for this requirement?

An application stores time-series metrics in Amazon DynamoDB. Queries are primarily for a specific device over a time range, and data automatically expires after 30 days. Which DynamoDB table design best fits this workload?

After enabling encryption at rest using AWS KMS on an Amazon RDS for Oracle instance, a security audit also requires encryption in transit for all client connections. Which action best meets this requirement?

A read-heavy application uses Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with several Aurora Replicas. The team enabled the RDS Proxy endpoint but still sees high CPU on the writer during bursts of new connections from a fleet of AWS Lambda functions. Which change is most likely to reduce the connection storm on the writer?

An Amazon RDS for MySQL instance shows intermittent high read latency. CloudWatch indicates high ReadIOPS and low CPU utilization. The workload performs many random reads on a large dataset that does not fit in memory. What is the most appropriate optimization?

A company uses Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) to store user profiles. They need to audit which IAM principals initiated database connections and detect anomalous access patterns. Which solution provides the most complete visibility with minimal application changes?

An on-premises SQL Server database uses Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) with a customer-managed key. The company migrates to Amazon RDS for SQL Server and must keep control of the encryption key lifecycle and enforce separation of duties. Which approach best meets the requirement?

A financial services company must run analytics on sensitive data in Amazon Redshift. They require that query results and intermediate spill files are encrypted, and they want to prevent users from copying query results to unencrypted client locations. Which combination of controls best meets these requirements?

A global application uses Amazon Aurora Global Database. During a regional outage test, the team promotes a secondary Region to be the writer. After failover, they must ensure the old primary cannot accept writes if it returns (to avoid split-brain) and they need the fastest recovery back to a multi-Region topology. Which operational approach is most appropriate?