Free AWS Certified Data Analytics Specialty – Questions & Answers

1. A company wants to research user turnover by analyzing the past 3 months of user activities. With
millions of users, 1.5 TB of uncompressed data is generated each day. A 30-node Amazon Redshift
cluster with 2.56 TB of solid state drive (SSD) storage for each node is required to meet the query
performance goals. The company wants to run an additional analysis on a year's worth of historical
data to examine trends indicating which features are most popular. This analysis will be done once
a week. What is the MOST cost-effective solution?

2. A company uses the Amazon Kinesis SDK to write data to Kinesis Data Streams. Compliance
requirements state that the data must be encrypted at rest using a key that can be rotated. The
company wants to meet this encryption requirement with minimal coding effort. How can these
requirements be met?

3. A mobile gaming company wants to capture data from its gaming app and make the data available
for analysis immediately. The data record size will be approximately 20 KB. The company is
concerned about achieving optimal throughput from each device. Additionally, the company wants
to develop a data stream processing application with dedicated throughput for each consumer.
Which solution would achieve this goal?

4. A company wants to enrich application logs in near-real-time and use the enriched dataset for
further analysis. The application is running on Amazon EC2 instances across multiple Availability
Zones and storing its logs using Amazon CloudWatch Logs. The enrichment source is stored in an
Amazon DynamoDB table. Which solution meets the requirements for the event collection and
enrichment?

5. A smart home automation company must efficiently ingest and process messages from various
connected devices and sensors. The majority of these messages are comprised of a large number of
small files. These messages are ingested using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and sent to Amazon
S3 using a Kinesis data stream consumer application. The Amazon S3 message data is then passed
through a processing pipeline built on Amazon EMR running scheduled PySpark jobs. The data
platform team manages data processing and is concerned about the efficiency and cost of
downstream data processing. They want to continue to use PySpark. Which solution improves the
efficiency of the data processing jobs and is well architected?

6. An online retail company with millions of users around the globe wants to improve its ecommerce
analytics capabilities. Currently, clickstream data is uploaded directly to Amazon S3 as compressed
files. Several times each day, an application running on Amazon EC2 processes the data and makes
search options and reports available for visualization by editors and marketers. The company wants
to make website clicks and aggregated data available to editors and marketers in minutes to enable
them to connect with users more effectively. Which options will help meet these requirements in
the MOST efficient way? (Choose TWO)

7. A technology company is creating a dashboard that will visualize and analyze time-sensitive data.
The data will come in through Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose with the butter interval set to 60
seconds. The dashboard must support near-real-time data. Which visualization solution will meet
these requirements?

8. An airline has been collecting metrics on flight activities for analytics. A recently completed proof of
concept demonstrates how the company provides insights to data analysts to improve on-time
departures. The proof of concept used objects in Amazon S3, which contained the metrics in .csv
format, and used Amazon Athena for querying the data. As the amount of data increases, the data
analyst wants to optimize the storage solution to improve query performance. Which options
should the data analyst use to improve performance as the data lake grows? (Choose THREE)

9. A company stores its sales and marketing data that includes personally identifiable information (PII)
in Amazon S3. The company allows its analysts to launch their own Amazon EMR cluster and run
analytics reports with the data. To meet compliance requirements, the company must ensure the
data is not publicly accessible throughout this process. A data engineer has secured Amazon S3 but
must ensure the individual EMR clusters created by the analysts are not exposed to the public
internet. Which solution should the data engineer to meet this compliance requirement with LEAST
amount of effort?

10. A company uses Amazon Redshift as its data warehouse. A new table has columns that contain
sensitive data. The data in the table will eventually be referenced by several existing queries that
run many times a day. A data analyst needs to load 100 billion rows of data into the new table.
Before doing so, the data analyst must ensure that only members of the auditing group can read
the columns containing sensitive data. How can the data analyst meet these requirements with the
lowest maintenance overhead?

11. A healthcare company uses AWS data and analytics tools to collect, ingest, and store electronic
health record (EHR) data about its patients. The raw EHR data is stored in Amazon S3 in JSON
format partitioned by hour, day, and year and is updated every hour. The company wants to
maintain the data catalog and metadata in an AWS Glue Data Catalog to be able to access the data
using Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift Spectrum for analytics. When defining tables in the Data
Catalog, the company has the following requirements: Choose the catalog table name and do not
rely on the catalog table naming algorithm. Keep the table updated with new partitions loaded in
the respective S3 bucket prefixes. Which solution meets these requirements with minimal effort?

12. A large university has adopted a strategic goal of increasing diversity among enrolled students. The
data analytics team is creating a dashboard with data visualizations to enable stakeholders to view
historical trends. All access must be authenticated using Microsoft Active Directory. All data in
transit and at rest must be encrypted. Which solution meets these requirements?

13. A data engineering team within a shared workspace company wants to build a centralized logging
system for all weblogs generated by the space reservation system. The company has a fleet of
Amazon EC2 instances that process requests for shared space reservations on its website. The data
engineering team wants to ingest all weblogs into a service that will provide a near-real-time search
engine. The team does not want to manage the maintenance and operation of the logging system.
Which solution allows the data engineering team to efficiently set up the web logging system
within AWS?

14. An Amazon Redshift database contains sensitive user data. Logging is necessary to meet
compliance requirements. The logs must contain database authentication attempts, connections,
and disconnections. The logs must also contain each query run against the database and record
which database user ran each query. Which steps will create the required logs?

15. A company analyzes its data in an Amazon Redshift data warehouse, which currently has a cluster
of three dense storage nodes. Due to a recent business acquisition, the company needs to load an
additional 4 TB of user data into Amazon Redshift. The engineering team will combine all the user
data and apply complex calculations that require I/O intensive resources. The company needs to
adjust the cluster's capacity to support the change in analytical and storage requirements. Which
solution meets these requirements?

16. A company launched a service that produces millions of messages every day and uses Amazon
Kinesis Data Streams as the streaming service. The company uses the Kinesis SDK to write data to
Kinesis Data Streams. A few months after launch, a data analyst found that write performance is
significantly reduced. The data analyst investigated the metrics and determined that Kinesis is
throttling the write requests. The data analyst wants to address this issue without significant
changes to the architecture. Which actions should the data analyst take to resolve this issue?
(Choose TWO)

17. A bank operates in a regulated environment. The compliance requirements for the country in which
the bank operates say that customer data for each state should only be accessible by the bank's
employees located in the same state. Bank employees in one state should NOT be able to access
data for customers who have provided a home address in a different state. The bank's marketing
team has hired a data analyst to gather insights from customer data for a new campaign being
launched in certain states. Currently, data linking each customer account to its home state is stored
in a tabular .csv file within a single Amazon S3 folder in a private S3 bucket. The total size of the S3
folder is 2 GB uncompressed. Due to the country's compliance requirements, the marketing team is
not able to access this folder. The data analyst is responsible for ensuring that the marketing team
gets one-time access to customer data for their campaign analytics project, while being subject to
all the compliance requirements and controls. Which solution should the data analyst implement to
meet the desired requirements with the LEAST amount of setup effort?

18. A media analytics company consumes a stream of social media posts. The posts are sent to an
Amazon Kinesis data stream partitioned on user_id. An AWS Lambda function retrieves the records
and validates the content before loading the posts into an Amazon OpenSearch Service (Amazon
Elasticsearch Service) cluster. The validation process needs to receive the posts for a given user in
the order they were received by the Kinesis data stream. During peak hours, the social media posts
take more than an hour to appear in the Amazon OpenSearch Service (Amazon ES) cluster. A data
analytics specialist must implement a solution that reduces this latency with the least possible
operational overhead. Which solution meets these requirements?

19. A company's data analyst needs to ensure that queries run in Amazon Athena cannot scan more
than a prescribed amount of data for cost control purposes. Queries that exceed the prescribed
threshold must be canceled immediately. What should the data analyst do to achieve this?

20. A banking company wants to collect large volumes of transactional data using Amazon Kinesis Data
Streams for real-time analytics. The company uses PutRecord to send data to Amazon Kinesis, and
has observed network outages during certain times of the day. The company wants to obtain
exactly once semantics for the entire processing pipeline. What should the company do to obtain
these characteristics?

21. A global company has different sub-organizations, and each sub-organization sells its products and
services in various countries. The company's senior leadership wants to quickly identify which suborganization is the strongest performer in each country. All sales data is stored in Amazon S3 in
Parquet format. Which approach can provide the visuals that senior leadership requested with the
least amount of effort?

22. A marketing company is using Amazon EMR clusters for its workloads. The company manually
installs third-party libraries on the clusters by logging in to the master nodes. A data analyst needs
to create an automated solution to replace the manual process. Which options can fulfill these
requirements? (Choose TWO)

23. A large financial company is running its ETL process. Part of this process is to move data from
Amazon S3 into an Amazon Redshift cluster. The company wants to use the most cost-efficient
method to load the dataset into Amazon Redshift. Which combination of steps would meet these
requirements? (Choose TWO)

24. A university intends to use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to collect JSON-formatted batches of
water quality readings in Amazon S3. The readings are from 50 sensors scattered across a local lake.
Students will query the stored data using Amazon Athena to observe changes in a captured metric
over time, such as water temperature or acidity. Interest has grown in the study, prompting the
university to reconsider how data will be stored. Which data format and partitioning choices will
MOST significantly reduce costs? (Choose TWO)

25. A company has 1 million scanned documents stored as image files in Amazon S3. The documents
contain typewritten application forms with information including the applicant first name, applicant
last name, application date, application type, and application text. The company has developed a
machine learning algorithm to extract the metadata values from the scanned documents. The
company wants to allow internal data analysts to analyze and find applications using the applicant
name, application date, or application text. The original images should also be downloadable. Cost
control is secondary to query performance. Which solution organizes the images and metadata to
drive insights while meeting the requirements?