CompTIA Data+ DA0-002 (V2) Practice Question

The correct answer is to apply data filtering. The scenario explicitly states the report is slow because it is querying five years of data for a one-month view. The most direct and efficient first step is to filter the data at the source to retrieve only the necessary records. This significantly reduces the data volume that the reporting tool needs to process, which directly addresses the performance problem caused by a large data size.

Creating a pre-aggregated summary table is a valid and powerful optimization technique, but it involves changing the data structure and is a more complex, time-consuming project. It is not the most effective initial step compared to the simplicity of adding a filter to a query. Peer reviewing calculations addresses logical correctness, not performance issues related to data volume. Setting up monitoring alerts for stale data addresses data freshness, which is a different problem from the one described.