AWS Certified Big Data – Specialty — Question 36

An advertising organization uses an application to process a stream of events that are received from clients in multiple unstructured formats.
The application does the following:
✑ Transforms the events into a single structured format and streams them to Amazon Kinesis for real-time analysis.
✑ Stores the unstructured raw events from the log files on local hard drivers that are rotated and uploaded to Amazon S3.
The organization wants to extract campaign performance reporting using an existing Amazon redshift cluster.
Which solution will provide the performance data with the LEAST number of operations?

Answer options

• A. Install the Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose agent on the application servers and use it to stream the log files directly to Amazon Redshift.
• B. Create an external table in Amazon Redshift and point it to the S3 bucket where the unstructured raw events are stored.
• C. Write an AWS Lambda function that triggers every hour to load the new log files already in S3 to Amazon redshift.
• D. Connect Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to the existing Amazon Kinesis stream and use it to stream the event directly to Amazon Redshift.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Option B is correct because creating an external table in Amazon Redshift allows direct querying of the data stored in S3 with minimal operations. Option A would require additional setup and streaming that might introduce complexity. Option C involves a scheduled Lambda function, which adds unnecessary operations. Option D also involves additional streaming steps that could complicate the process compared to directly using the external table.