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AWS Database Interview Questions And Answers

Our experts providing  AWS Database  interview questions & Answers/Faqs can develop your carrier & knowledge to find the right job in a good MNC’s, doesn’t matter what kind of company you’re hired.

1. If I launch a standby RDS instance, will it be in the same Availability Zone as my primary?
A. Only for Oracle RDS types
B. Yes
C. Only if it is configured at launch
D. No
Answer D.

Explanation: No, since the purpose of having a standby instance is to avoid an infrastructure failure (if it happens), therefore the standby instance is stored in a different availability zone, which is a physically different independent infrastructure.

2. When would I prefer Provisioned IOPS over Standard RDS storage?
A. If you have batch-oriented workloads
B. If you use production online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads.
C. If you have workloads that are not sensitive to consistent performance
D. All of the above
Answer A.

Explanation: Provisioned IOPS deliver high IO rates but on the other hand it is expensive as well. Batch processing workloads do not require manual intervention they enable full utilization of systems, therefore a provisioned IOPS will be preferred for batch oriented workload.

3. How is Amazon RDS, DynamoDB and Redshift different?
Amazon RDS is a database management service for relational databases, it manages patching, upgrading, backing up of data etc. of databases for you without your intervention. RDS is a Db management service for structured data only.
DynamoDB, on the other hand, is a NoSQL database service, NoSQL deals with unstructured data.
Redshift, is an entirely different service, it is a data warehouse product and is used in data analysis.

4. If I am running my DB Instance as a Multi-AZ deployment, can I use the standby DB Instance for read or write operations along with primary DB instance?
A. Yes
B. Only with MySQL based RDS
C. Only for Oracle RDS instances
D. No
Answer D.

Explanation: No, Standby DB instance cannot be used with primary DB instance in parallel, as the former is solely used for standby purposes, it cannot be used unless the primary instance goes down.

5. Your company’s branch offices are all over the world, they use a software with a multi-regional deployment on AWS, they use MySQL 5.6 for data persistence.
The task is to run an hourly batch process and read data from every region to compute cross-regional reports which will be distributed to all the branches. This should be done in the shortest time possible. How will you build the DB architecture in order to meet the requirements?

A. For each regional deployment, use RDS MySQL with a master in the region and a read replica in the HQ region
B. For each regional deployment, use MySQL on EC2 with a master in the region and send hourly EBS snapshots to the HQ region
C. For each regional deployment, use RDS MySQL with a master in the region and send hourly RDS snapshots to the HQ region
D. For each regional deployment, use MySQL on EC2 with a master in the region and use S3 to copy data files hourly to the HQ region
Answer A.

Explanation: For this we will take an RDS instance as a master, because it will manage our database for us and since we have to read from every region, we’ll put a read replica of this instance in every region where the data has to be read from. Option C is not correct since putting a read replica would be more efficient than putting a snapshot, a read replica can be promoted if needed to an independent DB instance, but with a Db snapshot it becomes mandatory to launch a separate DB Instance.

6. Can I run more than one DB instance for Amazon RDS for free?
Yes. You can run more than one Single-AZ Micro database instance, that too for free! However, any use exceeding 750 instance hours, across all Amazon RDS Single-AZ Micro DB instances, across all eligible database engines and regions, will be billed at standard Amazon RDS prices. For example: if you run two Single-AZ Micro DB instances for 400 hours each in a single month, you will accumulate 800 instance hours of usage, of which 750 hours will be free. You will be billed for the remaining 50 hours at the standard Amazon RDS price.

For a detailed discussion on this topic, please refer our RDS AWS blog.

7. Which AWS services will you use to collect and process e-commerce data for near real-time analysis?
A. Amazon ElastiCache
B. Amazon DynamoDB
C. Amazon Redshift
D. Amazon Elastic MapReduce
Answer B,C.

Explanation: DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service. DynamoDB, therefore can be fed any type of unstructured data, which can be data from e-commerce websites as well, and later, an analysis can be done on them using Amazon Redshift. We are not using Elastic MapReduce, since a near real time analyses is needed.

8. Can I retrieve only a specific element of the data, if I have a nested JSON data in DynamoDB?
Yes. When using the GetItem, BatchGetItem, Query or Scan APIs, you can define a Projection Expression to determine which attributes should be retrieved from the table. Those attributes can include scalars, sets, or elements of a JSON document.

9. A company is deploying a new two-tier web application in AWS. The company has limited staff and requires high availability, and the application requires complex queries and table joins. Which configuration provides the solution for the company’s requirements?
A. MySQL Installed on two Amazon EC2 Instances in a single Availability Zone
B. Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ
C. Amazon ElastiCache
D. Amazon DynamoDB
Answer D.

Explanation: DynamoDB has the ability to scale more than RDS or any other relational database service, therefore DynamoDB would be the apt choice.

10. What happens to my backups and DB Snapshots if I delete my DB Instance?
When you delete a DB instance, you have an option of creating a final DB snapshot, if you do that you can restore your database from that snapshot. RDS retains this user-created DB snapshot along with all other manually created DB snapshots after the instance is deleted, also automated backups are deleted and only manually created DB Snapshots are retained.

11. Which of the following use cases are suitable for Amazon DynamoDB?Choose 2 answers

A. Managing web sessions.
B. Storing JSON documents.
C. Storing metadata for Amazon S3 objects.
D. Running relational joins and complex updates.
Answer C,D.

Explanation: If all your JSON data have the same fields eg [id,name,age] then it would be better to store it in a relational database, the metadata on the other hand is unstructured, also running relational joins or complex updates would work on DynamoDB as well.

12. How can I load my data to Amazon Redshift from different data sources like Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon EC2?
You can load the data in the following two ways:

You can use the COPY command to load data in parallel directly to Amazon Redshift from Amazon EMR, Amazon DynamoDB, or any SSH-enabled host.
AWS Data Pipeline provides a high performance, reliable, fault tolerant solution to load data from a variety of AWS data sources. You can use AWS Data Pipeline to specify the data source, desired data transformations, and then execute a pre-written import script to load your data into Amazon Redshift.

13. Your application has to retrieve data from your user’s mobile every 5 minutes and the data is stored in DynamoDB, later every day at a particular time the data is extracted into S3 on a per user basis and then your application is later used to visualize the data to the user. You are asked to optimize the architecture of the backend system to lower cost, what would you recommend?
A. Create a new Amazon DynamoDB (able each day and drop the one for the previous day after its data is on Amazon S3.
B. Introduce an Amazon SQS queue to buffer writes to the Amazon DynamoDB table and reduce provisioned write throughput.
C. Introduce Amazon Elasticache to cache reads from the Amazon DynamoDB table and reduce provisioned read throughput.
D. Write data directly into an Amazon Redshift cluster replacing both Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon S3.
Answer C.

Explanation: Since our work requires the data to be extracted and analyzed, to optimize this process a person would use provisioned IO, but since it is expensive, using a ElastiCache memoryinsread to cache the results in the memory can reduce the provisioned read throughput and hence reduce cost without affecting the performance.

14. You are running a website on EC2 instances deployed across multiple Availability Zones with a Multi-AZ RDS MySQL Extra Large DB Instance. The site performs a high number of small reads and writes per second and relies on an eventual consistency model. After comprehensive tests you discover that there is read contention on RDS MySQL. Which are the best approaches to meet these requirements? (Choose 2 answers)
A. Deploy ElastiCache in-memory cache running in each availability zone
B. Implement sharding to distribute load to multiple RDS MySQL instances
C. Increase the RDS MySQL Instance size and Implement provisioned IOPS
D. Add an RDS MySQL read replica in each availability zone
Answer A,C.

Explanation: Since it does a lot of read writes, provisioned IO may become expensive. But we need high performance as well, therefore the data can be cached using ElastiCache which can be used for frequently reading the data. As for RDS since read contention is happening, the instance size should be increased and provisioned IO should be introduced to increase the performance.

15. A startup is running a pilot deployment of around 100 sensors to measure street noise and air quality in urban areas for 3 months. It was noted that every month around 4GB of sensor data is generated. The company uses a load balanced auto scaled layer of EC2 instances and a RDS database with 500 GB standard storage. The pilot was a success and now they want to deploy at least 100K sensors which need to be supported by the backend. You need to store the data for at least 2 years to analyze it. Which setup of the following would you prefer?
A. Add an SQS queue to the ingestion layer to buffer writes to the RDS instance
B. Ingest data into a DynamoDB table and move old data to a Redshift cluster
C. Replace the RDS instance with a 6 node Redshift cluster with 96TB of storage
D. Keep the current architecture but upgrade RDS storage to 3TB and 10K provisioned IOPS
Answer C.
Explanation: A Redshift cluster would be preferred because it easy to scale, also the work would be done in parallel through the nodes, therefore is perfect for a bigger workload like our use case. Since each month 4 GB of data is generated, therefore in 2 year, it should be around 96 GB. And since the servers will be increased to 100K in number, 96 GB will approximately become 96TB. Hence option C is the right answer…… For more   Click Here

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