A company is designing an application that will write thousands of records per second to an Amazon DynamoDB table. The partition key is based on the date (e.g., '2023-10-25'). During load testing, the application experiences heavy throttling, even though the total provisioned write capacity is higher than the write rate. <br/><br/>What is the MOST likely cause of this issue?

Answer options:

The DynamoDB table is in the wrong AWS Region.

The partition key design is causing a hot partition.

DynamoDB Auto Scaling is not enabled.

The application is using eventually consistent reads.

How to approach this question

Recognize that sequential or low-cardinality partition keys (like dates) cause hot partitions in NoSQL databases.

Full Answer

B.The partition key design is causing a hot partition.✓ Correct

The partition key design is causing a hot partition.

In DynamoDB, provisioned throughput is divided evenly among partitions. If your workload is heavily skewed toward one partition key (like today's date), that partition becomes 'hot' and will throttle requests, even if the table's overall capacity is sufficient. A high-cardinality partition key (like a UUID) is required.

Common mistakes

Assuming Auto Scaling fixes poor database schema design.

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