AWS Certified Database Specialty is a professional certification offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that validates an individual’s expertise in designing, deploying, and managing databases on AWS. The certification focuses on the use of AWS database services such as Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DocumentDB.
To earn the certification, individuals must pass the AWS Certified Database – Specialty exam, which tests their knowledge and skills in areas such as database design, migration, performance optimization, security, and troubleshooting. The certification is intended for database administrators, database architects, and other IT professionals who work with databases on AWS.
AWS Certified Database Specialty Glossary
Here are some key terms that you might encounter while studying for the AWS Certified Database Specialty certification:
- Amazon Aurora: A MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database engine that is designed to be highly scalable, available, and performant.
- Amazon DynamoDB: A fast and flexible NoSQL database service that is designed to provide consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale.
- Amazon Elasticache: A fully managed in-memory data store and cache service that supports popular open-source engines such as Redis and Memcached.
- Amazon RDS: A fully managed relational database service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud.
- Amazon Redshift: A fast, fully managed data warehouse service that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze all of your data using standard SQL and existing BI tools.
- Backup and Recovery: The process of creating and storing copies of data for the purpose of restoring it in the event of a disaster or data loss.
- Data Migration: The process of transferring data from one database to another, typically for the purpose of upgrading to a newer version or moving to a different platform.
- Data Replication: The process of copying data from one database to another in real-time to keep them in sync.
- Disaster Recovery: The process of restoring data and services after a catastrophic event such as a natural disaster, power outage, or cyber attack.
- Performance Optimization: The process of tuning database settings and configurations to ensure optimal performance and minimize latency.
- Security: The process of protecting data and systems from unauthorized access, theft, and other malicious activities.
- Serverless Computing: A cloud computing model in which the cloud provider manages the infrastructure and automatically provisions and scales resources based on the application’s needs. AWS provides serverless options for databases, such as DynamoDB and Aurora Serverless.
AWS Certified Database Specialty Exam Guide
Here are some official resources for studying for the AWS Certified Database Specialty exam:
- Exam Guide: The AWS Certified Database Specialty Exam Guide provides a detailed overview of the exam format, content, and objectives. It also includes sample questions and resources for further study.
- Training Courses: AWS offers various training courses for the AWS Certified Database Specialty exam. These courses cover topics such as database design, migration, performance optimization, and security.
- Exam Readiness: AWS also offers an exam readiness course that helps you prepare for the exam by providing an overview of the exam format, content, and objectives.
- Whitepapers and Documentation: AWS provides a wealth of whitepapers and documentation that cover various topics related to databases on AWS. These resources can be helpful for further study and reference. You can find the whitepapers and documentation here:
AWS Certified Database Specialty Exam Tips and Tricks,
Here are some tips and tricks to help you prepare for and pass the AWS Certified Database Specialty exam:
- Read the Exam Guide: Make sure you carefully review the AWS Certified Database Specialty Exam Guide. It will give you a detailed overview of the exam format, content, and objectives.
- Take Practice Exams: Taking practice exams is one of the best ways to prepare for the real exam. It will help you identify areas where you need to focus your studying and get comfortable with the exam format.
- Study the Services: The exam covers a wide range of AWS database services, including Amazon RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora, Redshift, and more. Make sure you understand the key features, benefits, and limitations of each service.
- Focus on Key Concepts: The exam will test your understanding of key concepts such as data modeling, database design, backup and recovery, security, and performance optimization. Make sure you understand these concepts and how they relate to AWS database services.
- Know the Pricing: The exam may include questions related to pricing and cost optimization. Make sure you understand how AWS pricing works for database services, including factors such as instance types, storage, and data transfer.
- Review the Whitepapers and Documentation: AWS provides a wealth of whitepapers and documentation on databases on AWS. Reviewing these resources can help you deepen your understanding of key concepts and services.
AWS Certified Database-Specialty Cheat Sheet
The AWS Certified Database Specialty Cheat Sheet is your ideal instrument to have an overview of the exam before venturing. It will keep you loaded with the right resources and bridge the gap for your dream job. Furthermore, we will be adding a few quick links to ease your preparation process. We suggest you to a quick glance at this cheat sheet before you appear for the exam.
Review the Exam Objectives
The first step is to always have a denser look at each and every domain of the exam. Therefore, you must review the exam objectives and familiarise with the exam course. The course acts as a AWS Certified Database – Specialty Blue Print. A thorough analysis will help you to gain the required command to earn your desired certification. This exam covers the following domains:
- Workload-Specific Database Design 26%
- Deployment and Migration 20%
- Management and Operations 18%
- Monitoring and Troubleshooting 18%
- Database Security 18%
AWS Database Specialty Updated Course Outline
The AWS Certified Database Specialty exam covers the latest and updated course outline –
Module 1: Explain Workload-Specific Database Design (26%)
1.1 Learn to select suitable database services for specific types of data and workloads.
- Understand the differences between ACID vs. BASE workloads
- Understand suitable uses of types of databases including relational, key-value, document, in-memory, graph, time series, ledger (AWS Documentation: Database)
- Understand and identify use cases for persisted data vs. ephemeral data (AWS Documentation: Amazon EC2 instance store)
1.2 Learn about the strategies for disaster recovery and high availability.
- Understanding and selecting Region and Availability Zone placement to optimize database performance (AWS Documentation: Choose Regions and Availability Zones to minimize latency)
- Understanding and determining implications of Regions and Availability Zones on disaster recovery/high availability strategies (AWS Documentation: Disaster recovery options in the cloud)
- Understanding and differentiating use cases for reading replicas and Multi-AZ deployments (AWS Documentation: Multi-AZ deployments for high availability)
1.3 Learn to design database solutions for performance, compliance, and scalability.
- Understanding and recommending serverless vs. instance-based database architecture (AWS Documentation: Understanding database options for your serverless web applications)
- Understanding and evaluating requirements for scaling read replicas (AWS Documentation: Working with MySQL read replicas, Working with read replicas)
- Understanding and defining database caching solutions (AWS Documentation: Database Caching, Caching strategies)
- Understanding and evaluating the implications of partitioning, sharding, and indexing (AWS Documentation: Sharding with Amazon Relational Database Service, Choosing the Right DynamoDB Partition Key)
- Understanding and determining appropriate instance types and storage options (AWS Documentation: Amazon EC2 Instance Types)
- Understanding and determining auto-scaling capabilities for relational and NoSQL databases (AWS Documentation: Managing throughput capacity automatically with DynamoDB auto scaling, AWS Management Console with DynamoDB auto scaling)
- Understanding and determining the implications of Amazon DynamoDB adaptive capacity (AWS Documentation: Best practices for designing and using partition keys effectively)
- Understanding and determining data locality based on compliance requirements (AWS Documentation: Addressing Data Residency with AWS)
1.4 Learn to compare the costs of database solutions
- Understanding and determining cost implications of Amazon DynamoDB capacity units, including on-demand vs. provisioned capacity (AWS Documentation: Read/write capacity mode, Pricing for Provisioned Capacity, Pricing for On-Demand Capacity)
- Understanding and determining costs associated with instance types and automatic scaling (AWS Documentation: Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling)
- Understanding and designing for costs including high availability, backups, multi-Region, Multi-AZ, and storage type options (AWS Documentation: Multi-AZ deployments for high availability, Amazon RDS Multi-AZ)
- Understanding and comparing data access costs (AWS Documentation: Analyzing your costs with AWS Cost Explorer)
Module 2: Explain Deployment and Migration (20%)
2.1 Learn to automate database solution deployments.
- Understanding and evaluating application requirements to determine components to deploy (AWS Documentation: Evaluate your applications)
- Understanding and choosing suitable deployment tools and services (e.g., AWS CloudFormation, AWS CLI) (AWS Documentation: Using the AWS Command Line Interface, AWS CloudFormation best practices)
2.2 Learn to determine data preparation and migration strategies.
- Understanding and determining the data migration method (e.g., snapshots, replication, restore) (AWS Documentation: Restoring from a DB snapshot, Restore an Amazon RDS DB instance from a DB snapshot)
- Evaluating database migration tools and services (e.g., AWS DMS, native database tools) (AWS Documentation: Migration with native database tools and AWS DMS)
- Understanding and preparing data sources and targets (AWS Documentation: Configuring data target nodes, Creating a dataset from a database)
- Understanding and determining schema conversion methods (e.g., AWS Schema Conversion Tool) (AWS Documentation: AWS Schema Conversion Tool)
- Understanding and determining heterogeneous vs. homogeneous migration strategies (AWS Documentation: Heterogeneous database migration, Homogeneous database migration)
2.3 Learn to execute and validate data migration.
- Understanding and designing and script data migration (AWS Documentation: Best practices for AWS Database Migration Service, Database Migration Step-by-Step Walkthroughs)
- Understand and run data extraction and migration scripts (AWS Documentation: Extracting data from on-premises databases, Migrating data from an on-premises data, Database Migration Step-by-Step Walkthroughs)
- Understanding and verifying the successful load of data (AWS Documentation: Verifying that the data loaded correctly)
Module 3: Explain Management and Operations (18%)
3.1 Learn to determine maintenance tasks and processes.
- Understanding and accounting for the AWS shared responsibility model for database services (AWS Documentation: Shared Responsibility)
- Understanding and determining appropriate maintenance window strategies (AWS Documentation: AWS Systems Manager Maintenance Windows, Maintenance window scheduling and active period options)
- Understanding and differentiating between major and minor engine upgrades (AWS Documentation: Upgrading a DB instance engine version)
3.2 Learn to determine backup and restore strategies.
- Understanding and identifying the need for automatic and manual backups/snapshots (AWS Documentation: Comparing Automatic and Manual Snapshots, Amazon EBS snapshots)
- Understanding and differentiating backup and restore strategies (e.g., full backup, point-in-time, encrypting backups cross-Region) (AWS Documentation: Creating backup copies across AWS Regions)
- Understanding and defining retention policies (AWS Documentation: Implement data retention policies for each class, Work with retention rules)
- Understanding and correlating the backup and restore to recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements (AWS Documentation: Plan for Disaster Recovery (DR), Disaster recovery options in the cloud)
3.3 Learn to manage the operational environment of a database solution.
- Orchestrate the refresh of lower environments (AWS Documentation: Updating compute environments, Orchestrating database refreshes for Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora)
- Implement configuration changes (e.g., in Amazon RDS option/parameter groups or Amazon DynamoDB indexing changes) (AWS Documentation: Working with parameter groups, Best practices for configuring parameters for Amazon RDS)
- Automate operational tasks (AWS Documentation: AWS Systems Manager Automation, Working with runbooks)
- Take action based on AWS Trusted Advisor reports (AWS Documentation: Get started with AWS Trusted Advisor)
Module 4: Explain Monitoring and Troubleshooting (18%)
4.1 Learn to monitor and alert strategies.
- Understanding and evaluating monitoring tools including Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS Performance Insights, database native (AWS Documentation: Overview of monitoring metrics in Amazon RDS, Monitoring DB load with Performance Insights on Amazon RDS)
- Understanding and determining appropriate parameters and thresholds for alert conditions (AWS Documentation: Working with threshold alerts in Amazon QuickSight, Working with alerts)
- Understanding to use tools to notify users when thresholds are breached including, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, Amazon CloudWatch dashboards) (AWS Documentation: Using Amazon CloudWatch alarms)
4.2 Learn to troubleshoot and resolve common database issues.
- Understand and identify, evaluate, and respond to categories of failures including troubleshooting connectivity; instance, storage, and partitioning issues) (AWS Documentation: Troubleshoot instances with failed status checks)
- Understanding and automating responses when possible (AWS Documentation: Options for Automating Response)
4.3 Learn to optimize database performance.
- Understanding and troubleshooting database performance issues (AWS Documentation: Troubleshooting for Amazon RDS)
- Understanding and identifying suitable AWS tools and services for database optimization (AWS Documentation: Best practices for Amazon RDS)
- Understanding and evaluating the configuration, schema design, queries, and infrastructure to improve performance
Module 5: Explain Database Security (18%)
5.1 Learn to Encrypt data at rest and in transit.
- Understand to encrypt data in relational and NoSQL databases (AWS Documentation: Encrypting Amazon RDS resources, Using SSL/TLS to encrypt a connection to a DB instance)
- Understand to apply SSL connectivity to databases (AWS Documentation: Using SSL/TLS to encrypt a connection to a DB instance)
- Understand to implement key management (e.g., AWS KMS, AWS CloudHSM) (AWS Documentation: AWS Key Management Service, AWS CloudHSM)
5.2 Learn to evaluate auditing solutions.
- Understand to determine auditing strategies for structural/schema changes (e.g., DDL) (AWS Documentation: Database audit logging, Handling schema updates)
- Understand to determine auditing strategies for data changes (e.g., DML) (AWS Documentation: DML auditing for Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility))
- Understand to determine auditing strategies for data access (e.g., queries) (AWS Documentation: Database audit logging)
- Understand to determine auditing strategies for infrastructure changes (e.g., AWS CloudTrail) (AWS Documentation: AWS CloudTrail)
- Understand and enable the export of database logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs (AWS Documentation: Exporting log data to Amazon S3)
5.3 Learn to determine access control and authentication mechanisms.
- Recommend authentication controls for users and roles including IAM, native credentials, Active Directory (AWS Documentation: Security best practices in IAM, Using the AWS Directory Service identity provider)
- Recommend authorization controls for users including policies (AWS Documentation: Policies and permissions in IAM)
5.4 Learn to identify potential security vulnerabilities within database solutions.
- Understand to determine security group rules and NACLs for database access (AWS Documentation: Controlling access with security groups, Control traffic to subnets using Network ACLs)
- Understand to identify relevant VPC configurations (e.g., VPC endpoints, public vs. private subnets, demilitarized zone) (AWS Documentation: VPC with public and private subnets (NAT), Amazon VPC)
- Understand to determine appropriate storage methods for sensitive data (AWS Documentation: Best practices for securing sensitive data in AWS data stores)
Quick Links for Resources
Choosing the right resources with reliable content is very important. As a matter of fact, there are various resources to choose from. This makes it difficult to select the authentic and genuine ones. As you have probably been preparing for this exam we hope that you have made a wise choice in terms of your learning resources. However, here area few quick links that will definitely benefit your preparations and help you ace the exam:
AWS Certified Database – Specialty Training
The importance of choosing the right online training is evident in your preparations. AWS offers training programs on every exam. The training programs for a particular exam contain all information of the exam such as description, intended audience, delivery method, duration etc. Therefore you should join a training program to gain knowledge and skills for AWS Certified Database Specialty. Build your technical skills with these
- AWS Database Offerings
- Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Database – Specialty
- Planning and Designing Databases on AWS
Online Tutorials
The best way to enhance your knowledge is by referring Online Tutorials. These Tutorials provide in depth understanding about the exam and its concepts. Additionally, it also covers exam details and policies. Therefore learning with Online Tutorials will result in strengthening your preparation.
Study Guides
The roadmap to your success is only complete when you have the right strategy. AWS Certified Database – Specialty Study Guides will be your support throughout your journey towards the AWS Certified Database Specialty exam. These guides will help you stay consistent and determined.
Reference Books
Your next resource is Books. AWS Certified Database – Specialty Books are enriched with information and are the most preferred resource to prepare for the exam. They help you gain in-depth clarity about the exam domains. Most important of all, you can find real-time examples of the different concepts you learn for this certification exam. Here are some books you can refer:
- Firstly, AWS: Be a Certified Database – Specialty by VB Dev
- Secondly, AWS Certified Database – Specialty by by Saransh Paliwal
- Thirdly, AWS Certified Database Study Guide: Specialty (DBS-C01) by by Eric Wilson
Practice Practice and Practice!
Finally, it is time to check your preparations. Self-Evaluation is the key and hence your next step is to attempt AWS Database Specialty Practice Exam. The more you’re going to practice, the better for you. Further, these tests familiarise you with the real exam environment and also help you analyse areas that need improvement. Strengthening your weaker domains will surely help you pass with flying colours. Also, attempting multiple practice tests is vital to boost your confidence So, outperform yourself with each subsequent test to be fully ready on the exam day. Start practising Now!
Tips for the Exam Day
The exam day can be really stressful. Remember that last minute preparations are a big NO! This is the very day when all your hard work comes to a test. To ease your stress we provide you with some tips to follow on your exam day.
- Firstly, stay calm and take long breathes before beginning the exam.
- Also, limit your distractions as that may affect your performance.
- Remember to read all the questions twice before attempting to increase accuracy.
- Then, Use the process of elimination, when deciding the answer to get rid of answers that are definitely wrong.
- Lastly, have trust in your preparations and believe in your instincts.
Expert’s Corner
Professional certifications make you job ready and provide a competitive edge. Preparing for a certification exam is just like planning to accomplish any significant goal. This cheat sheet provided you with a quick summary of the exam and its resources. It is easy to digest and really helpful in your last minute revisions. However you must remember that cheat sheet is not sufficient for qualifying the exam. You must begin your preparations by mastering the exam concepts through Online Tutorials. Further, follow a Study Guide to stay on the right track. Lastly, you must put your preparations to test with Practice Tests. Always remember that all incredible things need time. Therefore preparing for a certification is not easy. Neither is it quick. But it is worth the hard work and determination.
