AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02) — Question 476

A developer is designing a game that stores data in an Amazon DynamoDB table. The partition key of the table is the country of the player. After a sudden increase in the number of players in a specific country, the developer notices ProvisionedThroughputExceededException errors.

What should the developer do to resolve these errors?

Answer options

• A. Use strongly consistent table reads.
• B. Revise the primary key to use more unique identifiers.
• C. Use pagination to reduce the size of the items that the queries return.
• D. Use the Scan operation to retrieve the data.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

The ProvisionedThroughputExceededException is caused by a hot partition issue where a single partition key (country) receives more requests than the partition's throughput limit can handle. Redesigning the primary key to use more unique identifiers (high cardinality) distributes the request load evenly across multiple partitions. Other options like using Scan operations, strongly consistent reads, or pagination do not resolve the underlying partition distribution bottleneck.