A company is using a SQL database running on an Amazon RDS Single-AZ DB instance to store publicly accessible movie data. A script runs queries at random intervals each day to record the number of new movies added. The script must report a final total during business hours. The development team notices database performance is inadequate for development tasks while the script runs. A solutions architect must recommend a solution with the LEAST operational overhead. Which solution will meet this requirement?

Creating a read replica offloads the read-heavy script queries from the primary database instance, improving performance for development tasks on the main instance. This is a common and effective pattern for separating read and write workloads in RDS, and it has minimal operational overhead as RDS manages the replication. Modifying the DB instance to Multi-AZ improves availability for disaster recovery but does not offload read queries, so it wouldn't solve the performance issue. Manually exporting data is a highly operational and inefficient solution. Using Amazon ElastiCache is for caching frequently accessed data to reduce database load, but the script runs queries at random intervals and records new movies, which implies varying data, making caching less effective for this specific use case compared to a read replica.