AWS Certified Big Data – Specialty — Question 50

A data engineer is about to perform a major upgrade to the DDL contained within an Amazon Redshift cluster to support a new data warehouse application. The upgrade scripts will include user permission updates, view and table structure changes as well as additional loading and data manipulation tasks.
The data engineer must be able to restore the database to its existing state in the event of issues.
Which action should be taken prior to performing this upgrade task?

Answer options

• A. Run an UNLOAD command for all data in the warehouse and save it to S3.
• B. Create a manual snapshot of the Amazon Redshift cluster.
• C. Make a copy of the automated snapshot on the Amazon Redshift cluster.
• D. Call the waitForSnapshotAvailable command from either the AWS CLI or an AWS SDK.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

The correct answer is B because creating a manual snapshot of the Amazon Redshift cluster allows for a complete backup of the current state of the database, enabling a restore if needed. Option A is not sufficient as unloading data does not preserve the entire database state, while option C only duplicates an automated snapshot, which might not capture the latest changes. Option D is about waiting for a snapshot to be available, but does not ensure that a snapshot is created beforehand.