AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty — Question 11

A large company receives files from external parties in Amazon EC2 throughout the day. At the end of the day, the files are combined into a single file, compressed into a gzip file, and uploaded to Amazon S3. The total size of all the files is close to 100 GB daily. Once the files are uploaded to Amazon S3, an
AWS Batch program executes a COPY command to load the files into an Amazon Redshift cluster.
Which program modification will accelerate the COPY process?

Answer options

• A. Upload the individual files to Amazon S3 and run the COPY command as soon as the files become available.
• B. Split the number of files so they are equal to a multiple of the number of slices in the Amazon Redshift cluster. Gzip and upload the files to Amazon S3. Run the COPY command on the files.
• C. Split the number of files so they are equal to a multiple of the number of compute nodes in the Amazon Redshift cluster. Gzip and upload the files to Amazon S3. Run the COPY command on the files.
• D. Apply sharding by breaking up the files so the distkey columns with the same values go to the same file. Gzip and upload the sharded files to Amazon S3. Run the COPY command on the files.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Option B is correct because aligning the number of files with the number of slices in the Amazon Redshift cluster optimizes the COPY process by allowing parallel processing. The other options do not consider the slice count, which is critical for maximizing performance during the COPY operation.