Last updated on October 17, 2023
The AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty DAS-C01 exam is intended for people who have experience in designing, building, securing, and maintaining analytics solutions on AWS. The exam will test your technical skills on how different AWS analytics services integrate with each other. You also need to know how they fit in the data lifecycle of collection, storage, processing, and visualization.
This specialty certification exam is on par with the other AWS Professional level tests so you need to allocate ample time for your preparation. With the help of the official exam study guide, you can determine the areas that you need to focus on. It will show you the specific knowledge areas and domains that you must review to pass the exam.
Study Materials for the AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty DAS-C01 Exam
Before taking the actual exam, we recommend checking out these study materials for AWS Certified Data Analytics Specialty. These resources will help you understand the concepts and strategies that you will need for you to pass the exam:
- Free Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty DAS-C01 – this is an interactive course that has responsive image maps, accordions, sample problem sets, section-based quizzes, and a practice test in the end.
- AWS FAQs – can help you grasp every service briefly. The responses you will find here are commonly asked questions, use cases, and comparison of various AWS services.
- Tutorials Dojo’s AWS Cheat Sheets – can help you understand the lengthy concepts found in the AWS FAQs. These cheat sheets are presented in a bullet point format to help you digest the information easily. This page summarizes all the analytics services of AWS.
- AWS Knowledge Center – you can use this website to find and understand the most frequent questions and requests AWS receives from its customers.
- AWS Documentation and Whitepapers – this document will help you expand your knowledge on various AWS services with its detailed information. You can focus on the following whitepapers:
- Amazon EMR Migration Guide: How to Move Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop From On-Premises to AWS
- Big Data Analytics Options on AWS
- Lambda Architecture for Batch and Stream Processing
- Streaming Data Solutions on AWS
- Teaching Big Data Skills with Amazon EMR
- Reference Architecture: SQL Based Data Processing in Amazon ECS
- Tutorials Dojo’s AWS Certified Data Analytics Specialty Practice Exams – this provides a comprehensive reviewer with complete and detailed explanations to help you pass your AWS Data Analytics exam on your first try. The Tutorials Dojo practice exams are well-regarded as the best AWS practice test reviewers in the market.
AWS Services to Focus On For Your DAS-C01 Specialty Exam
The AWS Certified Data Analytics Specialty has five domains: Collection, Storage and Data Management, Processing, Analysis and Visualization, and Security. To comprehend the different scenarios in the exam, you should have a thorough understanding of the following services:
- Amazon Athena – learn how you can analyze the data in the S3 bucket and how you can configure and optimize Athena’s performance.
- Amazon CloudSearch – know the use case and features of the service.
- Amazon Elasticsearch – learn how you can integrate Elasticsearch and Kibana in different AWS services.
- Amazon EMR – understand the security, hardware, and software configurations of the EMR cluster and how you can use AWS Glue Data Catalog for table metadata.
- Amazon Kinesis – know the use case of each Kinesis service (Data Streams, Data Firehose, and Data Analytics) and how they differ from each other.
- Amazon QuickSight – learn how you can integrate QuickSight into your solution, how you can publish dashboards, reports, analytics, and how you can refresh your datasets.
- Amazon Redshift – understand the different SQL commands, the use case of Redshift cluster, Redshift Spectrum, and how you can analyze the data in the data warehouse.
- AWS Data Pipeline – learn the concepts and components of the pipeline.
- AWS Glue – understand the concepts of the data catalog, crawlers, workflows, triggers, jobs, job bookmarks, and job metrics.
You must know how these services interact to develop a complete data analytics solution in AWS. Also, prepare to see various Apache technologies, such as Apache Parquet, ORC, Avro, Oozie, Sqooq, HBase, and many more.
DAS-C01 Common Exam Scenarios for the AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty Exam
Scenario |
Solution |
DAS-C01 Exam Domain 1: Collection |
|
A near-real-time solution is needed that only collects non-confidential data from sensitive streaming data and stores it in durable storage. |
Use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to ingest streaming data and enable record transformation to utilize AWS Lambda for excluding sensitive data. Store the processed data in Amazon S3. |
Large files are compressed into a single GZIP file and uploaded into an S3 bucket. You have to speed up the |
Split the GZIP file into smaller files and make sure that their number is a multiple of the number of the Redshift cluster’s slices. |
Which service should you use to deliver streaming data from Amazon MSK to a Redshift cluster with low latency? |
Redshift Streaming Ingestion |
Ways to fix Amazon Kinesis Data Streams throttling issues on write requests. |
|
A company needs a cost-effective solution for detecting anomalous data coming from an Amazon Kinesis Data stream. |
Create a Kinesis Data Analytics application and use the |
DAS-C01 Exam Domain 2: Storage and Data Management |
|
A company wants a cost-effective solution that will enable them to query a subset of data from a CSV file. |
Use Amazon S3 Select |
You need to populate a data catalog using data stored in Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and Amazon DynamoDB. |
Use an AWS Glue crawler schedule |
A Data Analyst used the |
|
What is a cost-effective solution to saving Redshift query results to external storage? |
Use the Amazon Redshift |
A company is using Amazon S3 Standard-IA and Amazon S3 Glacier as its data storage. Some data cannot be accessed with Amazon Athena queries. Which best explains this event? |
Amazon Athena is trying to access data stored in Amazon S3 Glacier. |
DAS-C01 Exam Domain 3: Processing | |
A company uses an Amazon EMR cluster to process 10 batch jobs every day. Each job takes about 20 minutes to complete. A solution to lower down the cost of the EMR cluster must be implemented. |
Use transient Amazon EMR clusters |
An Amazon Kinesis Client Library (KCL) application is processing data in a DynamoDB table that has provisioned write capacity. The application’s latency increases during peak times and it must be resolved immediately. |
Increase the DynamoDB tables’ write throughput. |
Thousands of files are being loaded in a central fact table hosted on Amazon Redshift. You need to optimize the cluster resource utilization when loading data into the fact table. |
Use a single COPY command to load data. |
A Lambda function is used to process data from a Kinesis Data stream. Results are delivered into Amazon ES. During peak hours, the processing time slows down. |
Use multiple Lambda functions to process data concurrently. |
A Data Analyst needs to join data stored in Amazon Redshift and data stored in Amazon S3. The Analyst wants a serverless solution that will reduce the workload of the Redshift cluster. |
Create an external table using Amazon Redshift Spectrum for the S3 data and use Redshift SQL queries for join operations. |
DAS-C01 Exam Domain 4: Analysis and Visualization |
|
A company requires an out-of-the-box solution for visualizing complex real-world scenarios and forecasting trends. |
Use ML-powered forecasting with Amazon QuickSight |
A Data Analyst needs to use Amazon QuickSight to create daily reports based on the dataset stored in Amazon S3. |
Create a daily schedule refresh for the dataset. |
A company has encountered an import into SPICE error after using Amazon QuickSight to query a new Amazon Athena table that is associated with a new S3 bucket. |
Configure the correct permissions for the new S3 bucket from the QuickSight Console. |
A company needs a cost-effective solution for ad-hoc analyses and data visualizations. |
Use Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight. |
A company needs to visualize and analyze web logs in near-real time. |
Use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to stream logs into Amazon Elasticsearch. Visualize logs using Kibana. |
DAS-C01 Exam Domain 5: Security | |
Root device volume encryption must be enabled on all nodes of an EMR cluster. AWS CloudFormation is required for creating new resources. |
Create a custom AMI with encrypted root device volume and place the AMI ID under the CustomAmild property within the CloudFormation template. |
A solution is needed to encrypt data stored in an EBS volume that is attached to an EMR cluster |
Use Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS). |
A company is having trouble accessing data in a Redshift cluster using Amazon QuickSight. |
Create a new inbound rule for the cluster’s security group that allows access from the IP address range that Amazon QuickSight uses. |
A company wants to prevent any user from creating EMR clusters that are accessible from the public Internet. |
Enable the ‘block public access’ setting in the Amazon EMR Console. |
A company wants data in a Kinesis Data stream to be encrypted. The company wants to manage the key rotation. |
Specify a Customer Master Key when enabling server-side encryption for the Kinesis Data stream. |
Validate Your Knowledge For the DAS-C01 Specialty Exam
After you’ve reviewed the materials above, the next resource that you should check is the FREE AWS sample questions for AWS Data Analytics Specialty. Although this sample exam is not on the same level of difficulty as one might expect on the real exam, it is still a helpful resource for your review. Be sure to check the sample questionnaire often since AWS may upload a new version of it.
For high-quality practice exams, you can use our AWS Certified Data Analytics Specialty Practice Exams. These practice tests will help you boost your preparedness for the real exam. It contains multiple sets of questions that cover almost every area that you can expect from the real certification exam. We have also included detailed explanations and adequate reference links to help you understand why the option with the correct answer is better than the rest of the options. This is the value that you will get from our course. Practice exams are a great way to determine which areas you are weak in, and it will also highlight the important information that you might have missed during your review.
Sample Practice Test Questions for the DAS-C01 Exam:
Question 1
A game retail company stores user purchase data on a MySQL database hosted in Amazon RDS. The company will regularly run queries and analytical workloads against the current 3-month worth of data, which is expected to be several terabytes in size. The older historical data needs to be stored outside the database but is still used for the quarterly trend reports. To generate this report, the historical data are joined with the more recent data.
Which of the following options will provide optimal performance and a cost-effective solution based on the requirements?
- Sync a year’s worth of data on an Amazon RDS read replica. Export the older historical data into an Amazon S3 bucket for long-term storage. From the data in Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS, create an AWS Glue Data Catalog and use Amazon Athena to join the historical and current data to generate the reports.
- Use AWS Glue to perform ETL and incrementally load a year’s worth of data into an Amazon Redshift cluster. Run the regular queries against this cluster. Create an AWS Glue Data Catalog of the data in Amazon S3 and use Amazon Athena to join the historical and current data to generate the reports.
- Set up a multi-AZ RDS database and run automated snapshots on the standby instance. Configure Amazon Athena to run historical queries on the S3 bucket containing the automated snapshots.
- Export the historical data to Amazon S3. Create a daily job that exports current data from Amazon RDS to Amazon Redshift. Use the native Amazon Redshift for regular queries and Amazon Redshift Spectrum for joining the historical and current data.
Question 2
After creating a table from a record set stored in Amazon S3, a data analyst attempted to preview it by running a SELECT*
statement. The analyst then partitioned the data using the year=2022/month=01/day=01/
format. While the partitioning was successful, no records were returned when the same SELECT *
query was executed.
What could be a possible reason for this?
- The analyst did not run the
MSCK REPAIR TABLE
command after partitioning the data. - The analyst forgot to run the
MSCK REPAIR TABLE
command before partitioning the data. - The S3 bucket where the sample data is stored has insufficient read permissions.
- The analyst did not use the
CREATE TABLE AS SELECT
(CTAS) command to create the table.
Click here for more AWS Certified Data Analytics Specialty practice exam questions.
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Final Remarks
To understand a service at a higher level, we recommend that you get hands-on experience. A lot of questions in the exam try to validate whether you’ve seen a particular error or issue during your practice. To prepare yourself for the actual exam, you can use the AWS Free Tier account to simulate different scenarios. With the combination of theoretical and practical knowledge, you can pass the test with flying colors.
We hope that our guide has helped you achieve your goal, and we would love to hear back from you after your exam. Remember that the most important thing before the day of your exam is to get some well-deserved rest. Good luck, and we wish you all the best.