A seasonal tax-appeal departmental app needs full relational SQL compatibility but sits nearly idle most months and spikes for a few weeks. Which database option best fits variable load without oversized always-on capacity?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Seasonal tax season is like a pop-up permit window—busy for weeks, quiet the rest of the year. Aurora Serverless v2 keeps the relational language you need and flexes capacity instead of renting a stadium all winter.
Full Explanation
A seasonal tax-appeal departmental application needs full relational SQL compatibility yet sits nearly idle most months and spikes for only a few weeks. Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 fits that civic calendar: it keeps Aurora’s relational engine and SQL surface while scaling capacity up during appeal season and down when the department is quiet, avoiding a year-round oversized always-on instance. Municipal finance teams get the transactional integrity appeals require without paying stadium-sized capacity in the off-season.
A fixed largest Amazon RDS instance running 24/7 provides headroom but wastes budget for most of the year and still may need manual changes if the spike exceeds the chosen size. Amazon S3 Select is for filtering objects in S3—it is not an OLTP engine for appeal case transactions, concurrency control, or multi-row updates. Amazon Neptune Serverless targets graph workloads; the stem asks for relational SQL compatibility for tax forms, not graph traversals as a mandatory model.
Exam caveat: Aurora Serverless v2 still needs sensible minimum/maximum ACUs, connection management, and cold-start/scale-up expectations under sudden appeal-week bursts. Serverless is not a license to ignore schema design or indexing. Also distinguish Serverless v2 from older v1 behaviors if older training materials appear in distractors.
Operational check: set ACU floors/ceilings from last year’s appeal traffic; load-test the first Monday of appeal season; verify SQL features the department relies on are supported; and confirm budgets reflect scaled hours rather than a permanently maxed RDS class sitting idle from spring through fall.