AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)Design Resilient ArchitecturesMedium

A large enterprise is migrating its on-premises data warehouse to AWS. The data warehouse stores petabytes of historical sales data that is regularly accessed for complex analytical queries. The enterprise requires a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that offers high performance for analytical workloads, can scale compute and storage independently, and is cost-effective. Which AWS service is the most suitable for this requirement?

  1. AAmazon DynamoDB.
  2. BAmazon RDS for PostgreSQL.
  3. CAmazon Athena.
  4. DAmazon Redshift.
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: D. Amazon Redshift.

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service designed for high-performance analytical queries. It allows independent scaling of compute and storage (with RA3 instances), making it cost-effective for large datasets and complex analytical workloads, perfectly matching the enterprise's needs for a data warehouse.

Why the other options are wrong

  • A. Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database for key-value and document workloads, unsuitable for complex analytical queries across petabytes of data.
  • B. Amazon RDS is a relational database for transactional workloads, not optimized for petabyte-scale analytical data warehousing.
  • C. Amazon Athena is an interactive query service for S3 data, serverless, but Redshift is a dedicated data warehouse for managed, high-performance analytical queries on structured data.

Amazon Redshift

A fully managed, petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse service designed for high-performance analytical processing of large datasets.

  • Optimized for complex analytical queries.
  • Columnar storage and parallel processing for speed.
  • RA3 instances allow independent scaling of compute and storage.

Memory trick: Redshift is the super-computer brain for all your data questions.

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