DB1-C01 - AWS Certified Database - Specialty Beta Exam
The beta exam consists of 85 questions and 230 minutes, including 5 minutes pre- and post- for some questions. There's not much information out there at the moment about this exam other than this guide.
I completed the exam today, and out of the 230 minutes available I used about 130m (2h 10m) to go through all 85 questions and double-check my answers on questions I flagged. I could have spent longer going over some answers but after 2 hours+ in a room with a noisy air conditioning unit, I was struggling.
Sadly, results aren't available immediately for beta exams, with results being made available around 90 days after the end of the beta period (which is today!), so I've no idea how well I did. What I can talk about is what the exam was made up of.
It was not as bad as I expected it to be, given that I had all of 3 days to prepare for this (I asked my manager to approve the expense in early December, they only got back to me this week and the beta period ends today!). I was fully expecting not to be able to answer many of the questions but there were only 2 or 3 that I had to completely guess on and these were for products that I have never used.
In those 3 days, I did a lot of reading around DynamoDB and Aurora, focussing on backup/restore, encryption and security. I reasoned that the majority of the questions would be on those two services and these are the key areas for general DBA stuff. I also found this blog post, which has more detail than I can provide, but at least showed that I was focussing on the right things.
Some things that you should be sure to know about based on my experience today:
There were also a couple of questions on Neptune. These seemed to have an obvious answer despite me not knowing anything about it (we'll see!), and a couple on Redshift (which I'd done minimal reading on). These only related to moving data between regions and importing data.
On that note, if you see a question that you don't understand or don't know the product, don't panic! Flag it first of all so you can come back to it later if you need to. Then spend some time on it - look at the answers and rule out the impossible ones, then concentrate on the details of the question.
One thing to be cautious of is relying on old knowledge. e.g. I answered one question based on the fact that DynamoDB global tables can't use transactions, which hasn't been true since Nov 2018.
All the questions have all of the information you need to answer them in the question text. You may not realise it at first - take your time and read the question slowly and carefully. It's a bit like a cyryptic crossword in a way; when you understand the code you can answer the question. Look out for key phrases such as "most cost-efficient way", "with minimal downtime", "without changes to the application". These small hints usually provide the important detail that will often differentiate between two or three very similar answers.
I completed the exam today, and out of the 230 minutes available I used about 130m (2h 10m) to go through all 85 questions and double-check my answers on questions I flagged. I could have spent longer going over some answers but after 2 hours+ in a room with a noisy air conditioning unit, I was struggling.
Sadly, results aren't available immediately for beta exams, with results being made available around 90 days after the end of the beta period (which is today!), so I've no idea how well I did. What I can talk about is what the exam was made up of.
It was not as bad as I expected it to be, given that I had all of 3 days to prepare for this (I asked my manager to approve the expense in early December, they only got back to me this week and the beta period ends today!). I was fully expecting not to be able to answer many of the questions but there were only 2 or 3 that I had to completely guess on and these were for products that I have never used.
In those 3 days, I did a lot of reading around DynamoDB and Aurora, focussing on backup/restore, encryption and security. I reasoned that the majority of the questions would be on those two services and these are the key areas for general DBA stuff. I also found this blog post, which has more detail than I can provide, but at least showed that I was focussing on the right things.
Some things that you should be sure to know about based on my experience today:
- How to move databases to an encrypted state from an unencrypted one on all products
- How to move encrypted databases cross-region for all products
- How to migrate data effectively to Aurora clusters from other services - both from within and outside AWS
- Relative downtimes and speed of various data migration options
- Database Migration Service & SCT
- RDS MySQL vs Aurora MySQL - you must understand how they are different
- Multi-AZ failover process for all products, methods to failover manually and automatically
- Global tables and global databases - their purpose and limitations
- Performance monitoring and configuration on Aurora/RDS/DynamoDB
- Managing secrets in CloudFormation
There were also a couple of questions on Neptune. These seemed to have an obvious answer despite me not knowing anything about it (we'll see!), and a couple on Redshift (which I'd done minimal reading on). These only related to moving data between regions and importing data.
On that note, if you see a question that you don't understand or don't know the product, don't panic! Flag it first of all so you can come back to it later if you need to. Then spend some time on it - look at the answers and rule out the impossible ones, then concentrate on the details of the question.
One thing to be cautious of is relying on old knowledge. e.g. I answered one question based on the fact that DynamoDB global tables can't use transactions, which hasn't been true since Nov 2018.
All the questions have all of the information you need to answer them in the question text. You may not realise it at first - take your time and read the question slowly and carefully. It's a bit like a cyryptic crossword in a way; when you understand the code you can answer the question. Look out for key phrases such as "most cost-efficient way", "with minimal downtime", "without changes to the application". These small hints usually provide the important detail that will often differentiate between two or three very similar answers.
Thanks for the insight nicely drafted , it will really help those aspiring for this certification.
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