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