AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 1009

A company migrated a MySQL database from the company's on-premises data center to an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The company sized the RDS DB instance to meet the company's average daily workload. Once a month, the database performs slowly when the company runs queries for a report. The company wants to have the ability to run reports and maintain the performance of the daily workloads.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create a read replica of the database. Direct the queries to the read replica.
• B. Create a backup of the database. Restore the backup to another DB instance. Direct the queries to the new database.
• C. Export the data to Amazon S3. Use Amazon Athena to query the S3 bucket.
• D. Resize the DB instance to accommodate the additional workload.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Creating an Amazon RDS read replica (Option A) is the most efficient way to offload read-heavy reporting queries from the primary database, thereby protecting the performance of the daily workload. Restoring from a backup (Option B) or exporting to S3 (Option C) introduces unnecessary operational overhead and delay for a monthly report. Scaling up the DB instance (Option D) is cost-ineffective as it would require paying for overprovisioned resources during the rest of the month.