AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 756

A company hosts a database that runs on an Amazon RDS instance that is deployed to multiple Availability Zones. The company periodically runs a script against the database to report new entries that are added to the database. The script that runs against the database negatively affects the performance of a critical application. The company needs to improve application performance with minimal costs.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Add functionality to the script to identify the instance that has the fewest active connections. Configure the script to read from that instance to report the total new entries.
• B. Create a read replica of the database. Configure the script to query only the read replica to report the total new entries.
• C. Instruct the development team to manually export the new entries for the day in the database at the end of each day.
• D. Use Amazon ElastiCache to cache the common queries that the script runs against the database.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Creating an Amazon RDS read replica offloads the read-heavy reporting queries from the primary database instance, resolving the performance bottleneck on the critical application with minimal configuration. Option A is not feasible because standby instances in a standard Multi-AZ deployment do not accept read traffic. Option C introduces high operational overhead through manual work, and Option D is ineffective because caching is not suitable for scripts querying continuously changing, newly added database entries.