AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01) — Question 168

A company uses AWS Glue Data Catalog to index data that is uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket every day. The company uses a daily batch processes in an extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipeline to upload data from external sources into the S3 bucket.

The company runs a daily report on the S3 data. Some days, the company runs the report before all the daily data has been uploaded to the S3 bucket. A data engineer must be able to send a message that identifies any incomplete data to an existing Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic.

Which solution will meet this requirement with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Create data quality checks for the source datasets that the daily reports use. Create a new AWS managed Apache Airflow cluster. Run the data quality checks by using Airflow tasks that run data quality queries on the columns data type and the presence of null values. Configure Airflow Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) to send an email notification that informs the data engineer about the incomplete datasets to the SNS topic.
• B. Create data quality checks on the source datasets that the daily reports use. Create a new Amazon EMR cluster. Use Apache Spark SQL to create Apache Spark jobs in the EMR cluster that run data quality queries on the columns data type and the presence of null values. Orchestrate the ETL pipeline by using an AWS Step Functions workflow. Configure the workflow to send an email notification that informs the data engineer about the incomplete datasets to the SNS topic.
• C. Create data quality checks on the source datasets that the daily reports use. Create data quality actions by using AWS Glue workflows to confirm the completeness and consistency of the datasets. Configure the data quality actions to create an event in Amazon EventBridge if a dataset is incomplete. Configure EventBridge to send the event that informs the data engineer about the incomplete datasets to the Amazon SNS topic.
• D. Create AWS Lambda functions that run data quality queries on the columns data type and the presence of null values. Orchestrate the ETL pipeline by using an AWS Step Functions workflow that runs the Lambda functions. Configure the Step Functions workflow to send an email notification that informs the data engineer about the incomplete datasets to the SNS topic.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

The correct answer, C, is optimal as it uses AWS Glue workflows to automate data quality checks and integrates seamlessly with Amazon EventBridge to notify the data engineer about any incomplete datasets, minimizing operational overhead. Options A and B involve setting up additional infrastructure (Apache Airflow and Amazon EMR, respectively), which increases complexity and management efforts. Option D uses AWS Lambda and Step Functions, but it still requires additional management compared to the integrated AWS Glue solution.