Database Selection and Optimization Questions

Assess and justify data storage choices and optimizations across a cloud architecture. Topics include selecting managed relational databases such as Amazon Relational Database Service and Amazon Aurora, non relational key value and document stores such as Amazon DynamoDB, data warehousing solutions such as Amazon Redshift, and in memory caches such as Amazon ElastiCache. Candidates should explain trade offs between consistency, latency, and cost; choose row oriented versus columnar storage for online transaction processing versus analytics; design schemas that balance normalization and denormalization; apply indexing and query plan analysis; and use partitioning or sharding to scale throughput. Also cover caching strategies, storage tiering and lifecycle policies, backup and replication modes, read replica and failover choices, capacity planning and autoscaling behavior, and operational monitoring and tuning techniques.