Exam tips

We've covered the format of the exam (the duration of the exam, how many questions there are) and we've looked in depth at the domains and topics you will be tested on, so you should be confident in what you need to study to be able to pass the exam.

However, knowing some tips around how to tackle the exam can make a difference in terms of a pass or fail, so it's worth taking some time to think about a strategy for the exam so that you can maximize your chances of earning that pass.

Let's take a look at a sample question:

A company's online application stores order transactions in an Amazon RDS for a MySQL database. The database has run out of available storage and the application is currently unable to take orders.

Which action should a database specialist take to resolve the issue in the shortest amount of time?

1. Configure a read replica in a different AZ with more storage space.
2. Create a new DB instance with more storage space from the latest backup.
3. Change the DB instance status from STORAGE_FULL to AVAILABLE.
4. Add additional storage space to the DB instance using the ModifyDBInstance action.

Follow this approach to answer the question:

To begin, you should seek to understand what the question is really asking you, and what tools and services are in scope? For this question, these are the topics you need to consider:

• Amazon RDS for MySQL
• Storage

Now, you can clearly see the database technology in use that will help work out the correct answers, but first, let's eliminate the wrong ones.

For a large number of questions, at least one of the answers is obviously incorrect. If you can quickly identify the ones that cannot be correct and then make an educated guess between the remaining ones, you are likely to get a few more questions right, which could make the difference between a pass and a fail.

Once you've worked through this book, hopefully, you should quickly be able to discount answers 1 and 3. 3 is wrong because you cannot modify an instance status in that way, and 1 because adding a read replica does not solve the full storage problem.

That now leaves us with just two possible correct answers. If, at this point, you are not certain of the answer, you have still doubled your odds of guessing correctly.

In general, once you have removed the obviously incorrect answers, the ones you are left with would both work, but one meets the use case of the question more closely than the other.

The final step is to search the question for important keywords such as:

• Shortest time
• Fastest
• Most cost-efficient
• Simplest

Our question uses the phrase 'shortest amount of time'. We can use this additional information to help us decide on the correct answer. Creating a new database instance will take a lot longer than adding more storage to our existing one, and therefore the correct answer is 4.

You may find many questions you can simply answer without using this technique, but following this strategy on the questions you do not know will really make a difference to your final score.

To summarize the steps you should take for answering questions during the exam:

1. Identify the technologies and solutions being referred to in the question.
2. Remove answers that cannot be correct based on those technologies.

Identify the keywords in the question to help you work out the best answer from among the ones remaining. Now that you've learned the best techniques and tips to take into the exam, you should have a lot more confidence and a greater chance of success.