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MLA-C02 practice question: Ingesting and storing ML data (1 of 2)

Data Preparation for ML and AI A free question from our original MLA-C02 practice exam. Try it, then open the answer to see why each option is right or wrong.

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A pet insurer keeps six years of policy and claims records in an Amazon DynamoDB table that serves customer-facing apps around the clock.

A data scientist needs a complete copy of that table in Amazon S3 each night to train a claims-fraud model. The copy must reflect one consistent point in time, and building it must not reduce the read capacity the live apps depend on.

Which solution meets these requirements?

Choose one answer.

  1. A. Turn on point-in-time recovery, run a full export of the table to Amazon S3 each night, and convert the output to Parquet with AWS Glue.
  2. B. Run an AWS Glue job that scans the table through the DynamoDB connector every night and writes Parquet files to Amazon S3.
  3. C. Run a SageMaker Processing job that pages through the table with Scan operations and writes CSV files to Amazon S3 each night.
  4. D. Enable DynamoDB Streams on the table, and deliver every change through Amazon Data Firehose to Amazon S3 so that the nightly training job can read it.
Show the answer and explanation

Answer: A

  • A. Right: Correct. A full export reads from the point-in-time backup, so it uses no read capacity and does not affect the live table, and it captures the table as of one chosen time. Glue then converts the DynamoDB JSON output to Parquet for training. Learn more: DynamoDB data export to Amazon S3: how it works (opens in a new tab)
  • B. Wrong: A full Scan reads every item through the live table's read capacity, competing with customer traffic. Items are read over the course of the job, so the copy does not represent a single moment in time. Learn more: Scan operation in DynamoDB (opens in a new tab)
  • C. Wrong: Paginated scans have the same drawbacks: they consume read capacity and do not capture one point in time. The team would also maintain pagination and retry code that a managed export already handles.
  • D. Wrong: A stream records only the changes made after it is enabled, so existing items never appear unless they are loaded separately. The result is a change log rather than a point-in-time snapshot of the table. Learn more: Capturing table activity with DynamoDB Streams (opens in a new tab)

Explanation

A full DynamoDB export to Amazon S3 reads from a point-in-time backup, so it does not use the table's read capacity and gives one consistent snapshot. The export requires point-in-time recovery to be enabled on the table. Scans load the live table and streams only capture new changes, so neither gives the nightly snapshot the team needs.

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