AWS Certified Database - Specialty Intermediate Practice Exam: Medium Difficulty 2025

A financial services company is migrating a transactional application to AWS that requires strong ACID compliance and complex queries involving multiple JOIN operations. The database currently handles 15,000 transactions per second with peak loads reaching 25,000 TPS. The application requires read replicas in two additional AWS regions for disaster recovery and read scaling. Which database solution would BEST meet these requirements?

A database administrator is planning to migrate a 12 TB Oracle database to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The migration window is limited to 8 hours, and the database must remain online and accessible during the migration with minimal data loss. Which migration strategy should be implemented?

An e-commerce application uses Amazon Aurora MySQL with 1 writer and 3 reader instances. During flash sales, the application experiences CPU spikes on reader instances reaching 90%, while the writer instance remains at 40% utilization. The application team reports increased query latency during these periods. What is the MOST cost-effective solution to address this performance issue?

A company's Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database is experiencing slow query performance. CloudWatch metrics show that ReadLatency has increased from 5ms to 250ms over the past week, while WriteLatency remains stable at 8ms. The database's FreeableMemory metric shows a steady decline, currently at 15% of total memory. What should the database administrator do FIRST to diagnose and resolve this issue?

A healthcare application stores patient records in Amazon RDS for MySQL and must comply with HIPAA requirements. The security team requires that all data be encrypted at rest and in transit, with database administrators unable to access plaintext sensitive data. Database access must be audited, and encryption keys must be rotated annually. Which combination of AWS services and features should be implemented? (Choose the BEST combination)

A gaming company uses Amazon DynamoDB to store player session data with millions of active users. The table uses on-demand capacity mode and has a Global Secondary Index (GSI) for querying players by region. Recently, the application started experiencing ThrottlingExceptions on write operations to the GSI, while the base table is operating normally. What is the MOST likely cause and solution?

A company is performing a database migration from on-premises Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon RDS for SQL Server. The DMS replication task shows 'Table is being loaded' status for several hours on a 500 GB table, and the migration is not progressing. CloudWatch logs show no errors. What troubleshooting steps should be taken to identify and resolve the issue?

An Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL cluster experiences an unexpected failover from the primary instance to a read replica. The application team reports that queries executed immediately after the failover returned stale data for approximately 45 seconds. The cluster is configured with default settings. What configuration change would BEST prevent stale data reads during future failovers?

A database administrator notices that Amazon RDS automated backups for a production PostgreSQL database are failing with the error 'Backup retention period exceeded storage allocation.' The database is 2 TB in size with 7-day backup retention. Performance Insights shows normal operation. What is the MOST appropriate action to resolve this issue?

A financial application uses Amazon RDS for MySQL with encryption at rest enabled. The security team requires that database connection strings, including credentials, should never be hardcoded in application code or configuration files. The application runs on Amazon ECS tasks, and credentials must rotate automatically every 30 days without application downtime. Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?