Free Practice Questions for Amazon Web Services Data-Engineer-Associate Exam

Amazon Aurora zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift Serverless is designed specifically to provide near real-time analytics on transactional data with minimal operational overhead. This integration continuously replicates changes from Aurora MySQL databases into Redshift Serverless without requiring data pipelines, replication tasks, or infrastructure management.

Because the requirement emphasizes near real-time latency and minimal management, zero-ETL integration is the optimal choice. It eliminates the need to configure and monitor AWS DMS tasks, manage Glue jobs, or build and scale Lambda-based ingestion logic. Schema changes, data synchronization, and replication are handled automatically by AWS.

AWS DMS Serverless, while managed, still requires task configuration and monitoring and typically introduces more latency than zero-ETL integrations. AWS Glue jobs and Lambda functions require custom code, scheduling, and error handling, increasing both complexity and maintenance effort.

Therefore, setting up Aurora zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift Serverless best satisfies the requirements and aligns with AWS best practices for modern analytics architectures.

Redshift data sharing is a feature that enables you to share live data across different Redshift clusters without the need to copy or move data. Data sharing provides secure and governed access to data, while preserving the performance and concurrency benefits of Redshift. By setting up the sales team BI cluster as a consumer of the ETL cluster, the company can share the ETL cluster data with the sales team without interrupting the critical analysis tasks. The solution also minimizes the usage of the computing resources of the ETL cluster, as the data sharing does not consume any storage space or compute resources from the producer cluster. The other options are either not feasible or not efficient. Creating materialized views or database views would require the sales team to have direct access to the ETL cluster, which could interfere with the critical analysis tasks. Unloading a copy of the data from the ETL cluster to an Amazon S3 bucket every week would introduce additional latency and cost, as well as create data inconsistency issues. References:

Sharing data across Amazon Redshift clusters

AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate DEA-C01 Complete Study Guide, Chapter 2: Data Store Management, Section 2.2: Amazon Redshift

 This solution meets the requirements of implementing real-time analytics capabilities with the least operational overhead. By creating an external schema in Amazon Redshift, you can access the data from Kinesis Data Streams using SQL queries without having to load the data into the cluster. By creating a materialized view on top of the stream, you can store the results of the query in the cluster and make them available for analysis. By setting the materialized view to auto refresh, you can ensure that the view is updated with the latest data from the stream at regular intervals. This way, you can derive near real-time insights by using existing BI and analytics tools. References:

Amazon Redshift streaming ingestion

Creating an external schema for Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

Creating a materialized view for Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

Option A is correct because AWS Glue is a serverless ETL service built to run PySpark workloads at scale with minimal infrastructure management. AWS documentation states that you can install additional Python modules and libraries for use with AWS Glue ETL jobs, including by using the --additional-python-modules parameter and Amazon S3 paths for wheel artifacts or other supported package delivery methods. That directly addresses the requirement for custom internal libraries. Since the data is already in Amazon S3 and the result must be loaded into Amazon Redshift, Glue is a natural low-overhead fit for this daily transformation pipeline.

Option B and C require managing compute infrastructure or cluster lifecycle, which increases operational overhead. Option D is not the best fit because SageMaker Processing is designed primarily for ML-oriented data preparation, not as the standard AWS service for large-scale ETL into Redshift. The question explicitly asks for least operational overhead with scalable PySpark and custom libraries, and AWS Glue provides exactly that managed capability.

Problem Analysis:

The company uses DynamoDB for gaming data storage and needs to ingest data into Amazon OpenSearch Service in near real time.

Data updates must propagate quickly to OpenSearch for analytics or search purposes.

Key Considerations:

DynamoDB Streams provide near-real-time capture of table changes (inserts, updates, and deletes).

Integration with AWS Lambda allows seamless processing of these changes.

OpenSearch offers APIs for indexing and updating documents, which Lambda can invoke.

Solution Analysis:

Option A: Step Functions with Periodic Export

Not suitable for near-real-time updates; introduces significant latency.

Operationally complex to manage periodic exports and S3 data ingestion.

Option B: AWS Glue Job

AWS Glue is designed for ETL workloads but lacks real-time processing capabilities.

Option C: DynamoDB Streams + Lambda

DynamoDB Streams capture changes in near real time.

Lambda can process these streams and use the OpenSearch API to update the index.

This approach provides low latency and seamless integration with minimal operational overhead.

Option D: Custom OpenSearch Plugin

Writing a custom plugin adds complexity and is unnecessary with existing AWS integrations.

Implementation Steps:

Enable DynamoDB Streams for the relevant DynamoDB tables.

Create a Lambda function to process stream records:

Parse insert, update, and delete events.

Use OpenSearch APIs to index or update documents based on the event type.

Set up a trigger to invoke the Lambda function whenever there are changes in the DynamoDB Stream.

Monitor and log errors for debugging and operational health.

Amazon DynamoDB Streams Documentation

AWS Lambda and DynamoDB Integration

Amazon OpenSearch Service APIs

The Amazon EventBridge Scheduler offers a simple, serverless cron-based execution mechanism. It can trigger an AWS Glue ETL job that extracts data from Amazon RDS, formats it as CSV, and writes it to Amazon S3 — all without manual orchestration or servers.

“For scheduled data extraction and transformation, use AWS Glue jobs triggered by EventBridge Scheduler for fully managed, low-maintenance workflows.”

– Ace the AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate Certification - version 2 - apple.pdf

Glue natively integrates with RDS and S3, avoiding the need to manage Batch or EMR infrastructure.

The correct answer is D because Amazon Redshift row-level security provides granular access control over sensitive records by applying security policies at the database object level. This directly supports the requirement to let researchers access only records from their own departments without creating multiple copies of the dataset. Multi-condition SQL predicates are stronger than basic department-only filters because they can include department, role, sensitivity, and authorization logic in the same policy design. Creating separate schemas and views increases administrative overhead and can become inconsistent. Datashares are useful for sharing data but the option creates unnecessary departmental copies and does not solve record-level restriction by itself. Granting EXPLAIN RLS to researchers is also not needed for normal secure access.

Option A is correct. The MERGE INTO statement is used to conditionally update, insert, or delete rows based on a match condition between a target table and a source table. In this statement, the target table is accounts and the source table is monthly_accounts_update. The join condition is t.customer = s.customer. Because the statement uses WHEN MATCHED THEN DELETE, every row in accounts that has a matching customer value in monthly_accounts_update will be deleted from the target table.

AWS documentation for MERGE INTO states that it conditionally updates, deletes, or inserts rows into an Apache Iceberg table, and the syntax explicitly includes WHEN MATCHED THEN DELETE. AWS Glue guidance and examples for Iceberg also show MERGE INTO as a supported pattern for row-level changes in Glue ETL workflows. This means the syntax is valid for supported Glue-Iceberg use cases, so option D is incorrect. Options B and C are also incorrect because the statement does not retain only matching rows and does not delete the entire table. It deletes only the rows in the target table that satisfy the match condition.

Option A is the most direct and operationally efficient way to trigger the existing Lambda-based load into Amazon Redshift whenever a new CSV file is uploaded to Amazon S3. The key requirement is event-driven automation on “new object created” events, and the study material explicitly describes using Amazon EventBridge to react to S3 uploads by creating a rule on the default event bus and routing matching events to a target application.

Compared with queue-based designs (Options B and D), Option A reduces components: there is no need to manage an SQS queue, batching/visibility timeout behavior, or retry semantics at the consumer layer. This is especially appropriate because the files are small (≤ 5 MB) and the Lambda function is already implemented to perform the copy/load step. Using DMS (Option C) is not designed for “S3 object arrival → Lambda → Redshift” event triggering; it introduces unnecessary services and operational work for a simple file-ingestion trigger.

Therefore, integrating S3 event notifications with EventBridge and targeting the Lambda function best meets the requirement with the least added complexity.