AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 690

A company has an application that uses an Amazon DynamoDB table for storage. A solutions architect discovers that many requests to the table are not returning the latest data. The company's users have not reported any other issues with database performance. Latency is in an acceptable range.

Which design change should the solutions architect recommend?

Answer options

• A. Add read replicas to the table.
• B. Use a global secondary index (GSI).
• C. Request strongly consistent reads for the table.
• D. Request eventually consistent reads for the table.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

By default, Amazon DynamoDB uses eventually consistent reads, which can occasionally return stale data if a read occurs immediately after a write. To guarantee that the application always retrieves the most up-to-date write, the solutions architect must configure the read requests to use strongly consistent reads. Other options like GSIs or read replicas do not address this read consistency issue, and eventually consistent reads are already the default behavior causing the stale data.