AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01) — Question 43

A company uses an Amazon Redshift provisioned cluster as its database. The Redshift cluster has five reserved ra3.4xlarge nodes and uses key distribution.
A data engineer notices that one of the nodes frequently has a CPU load over 90%. SQL Queries that run on the node are queued. The other four nodes usually have a CPU load under 15% during daily operations.
The data engineer wants to maintain the current number of compute nodes. The data engineer also wants to balance the load more evenly across all five compute nodes.
Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Change the sort key to be the data column that is most often used in a WHERE clause of the SQL SELECT statement.
• B. Change the distribution key to the table column that has the largest dimension.
• C. Upgrade the reserved node from ra3.4xlarge to ra3.16xlarge.
• D. Change the primary key to be the data column that is most often used in a WHERE clause of the SQL SELECT statement.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

The correct answer is B because changing the distribution key to the column with the largest dimension helps to evenly distribute the data across all nodes, thus balancing the load. Option A does not address the distribution of data, and options C and D do not solve the underlying issue of uneven load distribution among nodes.