AWS Certified Database Specialty Practice Exam
The AWS Certified Database - Specialty certification is essential for organizations seeking to identify and nurture individuals with crucial skills to drive successful cloud initiatives. Attaining the AWS Certified Database – Specialty credential confirms proficiency in advising, architecting, and managing optimal AWS database solutions.
Designed for individuals in roles focused on databases, the AWS Certified Database - Specialty (DBS-C01) exam evaluates a candidate's comprehensive grasp of database principles, encompassing design, migration, deployment, access, maintenance, automation, monitoring, security, and troubleshooting. Additionally, the exam assesses the candidate's ability to:
- Distinguish the key features of AWS database services.
- Analyze requirements and tailor suitable database solutions using AWS services.
Who should take this exam?
The AWS Certified Database – Specialty certification targets individuals who possess proficiency and practical experience in managing both on-premises and AWS Cloud-based relational and non-relational databases. Before attempting this exam, it is advisable to meet the following prerequisites:
- A minimum of five years of experience with prevalent database technologies
- Two years of practical, hands-on experience and expertise in working with both on-premises and AWS Cloud-based relational and NoSQL databases
- Capability to discern and distinguish the essential features of AWS database services
- Proficiency in analyzing requirements and discerning suitable database solutions utilizing AWS services
Exam Details
- Exam Name: AWS Certified Database - Specialty
- Exam Code: DBS-C01
- Exam Duration: 180 minutes
- Exam Language: English, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese
- No. of Question: 65
- Type of Questions: Multiple Choice and Multiple Responses
- Passing Score: 750
Course Outline
The AWS Certified Database - Specialty Exam covers the following topics -
Module 1: Explain Workload-Specific Database Design (26%)
1.1 Learn to select suitable database services for specific types of data and workloads.
- Understand the differences between ACID vs. BASE workloads
- Understand suitable uses of types of databases including relational, key-value, document, in-memory, graph, time series, ledger
- Understand and identify use cases for persisted data vs. ephemeral data
1.2 Learn about the strategies for disaster recovery and high availability.
- Understanding and selecting Region and Availability Zone placement to optimize database performance
- Understanding and determining implications of Regions and Availability Zones on disaster recovery/high availability strategies
- Understanding and differentiating use cases for reading replicas and Multi-AZ deployments
1.3 Learn to design database solutions for performance, compliance, and scalability.
- Understanding and recommending serverless vs. instance-based database architecture
- Understanding and evaluating requirements for scaling read replicas
- Understanding and defining database caching solutions
- Understanding and evaluating the implications of partitioning, sharding, and indexing
- Understanding and determining appropriate instance types and storage options
- Understanding and determining auto-scaling capabilities for relational and NoSQL databases
- Understanding and determining the implications of Amazon DynamoDB adaptive capacity
- Understanding and determining data locality based on compliance requirements
1.4 Learn to compare the costs of database solutions
- Understanding and determining cost implications of Amazon DynamoDB capacity units, including on-demand vs. provisioned capacity
- Understanding and determining costs associated with instance types and automatic scaling
- Understanding and designing for costs including high availability, backups, multi-Region, Multi-AZ, and storage type options
- Understanding and comparing data access costs
Module 2: Explain Deployment and Migration (20%)
2.1 Learn to automate database solution deployments.
- Understanding and evaluating application requirements to determine components to deploy
- Understanding and choosing suitable deployment tools and services (e.g., AWS CloudFormation, AWS CLI)
2.2 Learn to determine data preparation and migration strategies.
- Understanding and determining the data migration method (e.g., snapshots, replication, restore)
- Understanding and evaluating database migration tools and services (e.g., AWS DMS, native database tools)
- Understanding and preparing data sources and targets
- Understanding and determining schema conversion methods (e.g., AWS Schema Conversion Tool)
- Understanding and determining heterogeneous vs. homogeneous migration strategies
2.3 Learn to execute and validate data migration.
- Understanding and designing and script data migration
- Understand and run data extraction and migration scripts
- Understanding and verifying the successful load of data
Module 3: Explain Management and Operations (18%)
3.1 Learn to determine maintenance tasks and processes.
- Understanding and accounting for the AWS shared responsibility model for database services
- Understanding and determining appropriate maintenance window strategies
- Understanding and differentiating between major and minor engine upgrades
3.2 Learn to determine backup and restore strategies.
- Understanding and identifying the need for automatic and manual backups/snapshots
- Understanding and differentiating backup and restore strategies (e.g., full backup, point-in-time, encrypting backups cross-Region)
- Understanding and defining retention policies
- Understanding and correlating the backup and restore to recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements
3.3 Learn to manage the operational environment of a database solution.
- Orchestrate the refresh of lower environments
- Implement configuration changes (e.g., in Amazon RDS option/parameter groups or Amazon
- DynamoDB indexing changes)
- Automate operational tasks
- Take action based on AWS Trusted Advisor reports
Module 4: Explain Monitoring and Troubleshooting (18%)
4.1 Learn to monitor and alert strategies.
- Understanding and evaluating monitoring tools including Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS Performance Insights, database native
- Understanding and determining appropriate parameters and thresholds for alert conditions
- Understanding to use tools to notify users when thresholds are breached including, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, Amazon CloudWatch dashboards)
4.2 Learn to troubleshoot and resolve common database issues.
- Understand and identify, evaluate, and respond to categories of failures including troubleshooting connectivity; instance, storage, and partitioning issues)
- Understanding and automating responses when possible
4.3 Learn to optimize database performance.
- Understanding and troubleshooting database performance issues
- Understanding and identifying suitable AWS tools and services for database optimization
- Understanding and evaluating the configuration, schema design, queries, and infrastructure to improve performance
Module 5: Explain Database Security (18%)
5.1 Learn to Encrypt data at rest and in transit.
- Understand to encrypt data in relational and NoSQL databases
- Understand to apply SSL connectivity to databases
- Understand to implement key management (e.g., AWS KMS, AWS CloudHSM)
5.2 Learn to evaluate auditing solutions.
- Understand to determine auditing strategies for structural/schema changes (e.g., DDL)
- Understand to determine auditing strategies for data changes (e.g., DML)
- Understand to determine auditing strategies for data access (e.g., queries)
- Understand to determine auditing strategies for infrastructure changes (e.g., AWS CloudTrail)
- Understand and enable the export of database logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs
5.3 Learn to determine access control and authentication mechanisms.
- Recommend authentication controls for users and roles including IAM, native credentials, Active Directory
- Recommend authorization controls for users including policies
5.4 Learn to identify potential security vulnerabilities within database solutions.
- Understand to determine security group rules and NACLs for database access
- Understand to identify relevant VPC configurations (e.g., VPC endpoints, public vs. private subnets, demilitarized zone)
- Understand to determine appropriate storage methods for sensitive data