Database Technologies Flashcards
What situations do you use read replicas for? What form of consistency do you get with read replicas?
Read heavy workloads. Updates to the replicas are asynchronous and are therefore eventually consistent.
Do you need to make changes to your application to make use of read replicas?
Yes, connection strings in the application will need to be made
Are updates to replicas synchronous or asynchronous?
Asynchronous - reads and are eventually consistent
How many read replicas can an RDS instance have for MySQL and Aurora?
5 for MySQL and 15 for Aurora
How do you control actions that your systems and user can take on specific RDS instances?
IAM will control access to RDS resources. Security groups can be used to control network traffic to the RDS instance
What mechanism is used to control network access with RDS?
Security groups are leveraged for RDS netowrk security
Is RDS encrypted at rest by default? If not, when do you specify encryption?
Not by default. You specify encryption when you create the DB instance. OR you can create an encrypted snapshot of the DB by copying it and encrypting via KMS and then you this to restore the encrypted instance.
In a multi AZ RDS deployment, what happens if the primary fails?
The CNAME record is switched from the primary to the secondary as a part of automatic fail over.
If you are using IAM authentication to connect to a database rather than a database username and password, what must be done on the database to enable this?
SSL must be set when connecting to the DB. This allows us to use IAM roles to connect to the DB
Can you run any form of auditing on the underlying infrastructure of an RDS database?
No. RDS is a managed service
What options are available for RDS maintenance windows?
no preference or scheduled maintenance windows are available
What is an Aurora global database and what is the region configuration for this?
Aurora Global DB’s span multiple regions and enable robust DR with lower latency reads. They have 1 primary and 1 secondary region. Recommended over Cross Region Replication.
What 2 database engines is Aurora compatible with?
MySQL and PostgreSQL
How long are DynamoDB streams retained for?
24 Hours
If you need to create a DynamoDB global table what do you need to enable in Dynamo first to allow this?
Need to enable DynamoDB streams as these enable Dynamo to generate a change log to replicate data across regions
In Dynamo DB what two attributes make a composite key and what is the maximum size of EACH of the attributes
A composite key is made up of:
The Partition Key: 2KB
The SORT key: 1KB
In redshift, how do EVEN, ALL, KEY distributions distribute data across compute nodes?
Even: All data is spread evenly across nodes
All: Every table is sent to every node
Key: Data is spread based on a single column value
For objects cached in DAX, what is the TTL?
5 minutes (300 secs)
Does DynamoDB have a VPC endpoint?
yes
In DynamoDB you are received a provisioned throughput exception during peak load several months ago. You are anticipating a spike in load next week. On analysis you see that several keys are getting read repeatedly. What technology could you use to alleviate the problem?
DAX will cache reads from dynamo transparently with no need to update the application
Where can data be loaded into RedShift from?
S3, DMS, other DBs, almost anywhere.
What is the use case for RedShift Spectrum?
OLAP Queries on data held directly in S3.
In RedShift, what is the purpose of a leader node and a compute node? How many compute nodes can there be for a leader node and what are the maximum sizes?
Leader: manages client connections and queries
Compute: Executes queries, stores data and performs compute operations.
1 Leader: 128 Compute Nodes. Max size of 160GB
Can you authenticate to Aurora using IAM?
Yes. SSL must be enabled to support this.