AWS Certified Database – Specialty — Question 264

A database specialist is planning to migrate a 4 TB Microsoft SQL Server DB instance from on premises to Amazon RDS for SQL Server. The database is primarily used for nightly batch processing.

Which RDS storage option meets these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. General Purpose SSD storage
• B. Provisioned IOPS storage
• C. Magnetic storage
• D. Throughput Optimized hard disk drives (HDD)

Correct answer: A

Explanation

General Purpose SSD (gp2/gp3) storage is the most cost-effective SSD-backed option for Amazon RDS, offering sufficient performance and capacity (up to 16 TiB) for a 4 TB database's nightly batch processing. Provisioned IOPS SSD is much more expensive and unnecessary for this workload, while Magnetic storage is outdated and has a 1 TiB limit for SQL Server. Throughput Optimized HDD is not a supported storage type for Amazon RDS DB instances.