Google Cloud · Free Practice Questions · Last reviewed May 2026
24real exam-style questions organised by domain, each with the correct answer highlighted and a plain-English explanation of why it's right — and why the others are wrong.
You are building a Looker dashboard and need to calculate the year-over-year growth rate. Which feature should you use to perform this without modifying the underlying SQL?
BigQuery query parameters.
Looker Table Calculations.
Table calculations provide flexible, on-the-fly math capabilities.
LookML derived tables with persistent caching.
Database-level User Defined Functions (UDFs).
You are analyzing query performance in BigQuery. You notice that your queries are spilling to disk. What is the most likely cause?
The project is using On-Demand pricing.
The dataset is stored in a multi-region location.
Using too many slots in the reservation.
An inefficient JOIN or GROUP BY operation causing high memory pressure.
Memory-intensive operations on non-optimized data result in disk spills.
A data scientist is using Vertex AI Workbench and needs to share a notebook with a team member who only needs read access. What is the most secure way to do this?
Add the user as a 'Vertex AI User' on your project.
Grant the user 'Storage Object Viewer' role on the Cloud Storage bucket containing the .ipynb file.
This provides read-only access to the file without granting compute permissions.
Copy the notebook code into an email.
Change the instance permissions to 'Public'.
Your team wants to visualize BigQuery data in Looker Studio. What is the most efficient way to ensure the dashboard reflects fresh data without manual refreshes?
Export the data to Google Sheets every hour.
Enable 'Automatic Refresh' in the Looker Studio browser extension.
Configure the data source to use 'Direct Query'.
Direct Query sends every request to BigQuery, ensuring data is as fresh as the underlying table.
Use a scheduled extract refresh.
You are identifying trends in a large dataset using BigQuery. Which SQL function is best suited to identify the top 5 products sold per region?
GROUP BY region, product.
SELECT TOP 5 * FROM sales.
RANK() OVER (PARTITION BY region ORDER BY sales DESC).
This partitions the data by region and ranks sales, making it easy to filter for the top 5.
SUM(sales) OVER (ORDER BY region).
A marketing manager needs to see daily sales trends in Looker. The underlying data is in BigQuery and is updated every 6 hours. What is the best way to visualize this?
Create a static PDF report sent via email.
Export BigQuery data to a CSV file.
Build a dashboard in Cloud Monitoring.
Create a Looker Explore and build a time-series line chart.
Explores allow for dynamic, accurate time-series visualization.
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Practice this domainA team requires access to a specific Dataplex Zone. You want to grant them the ability to view metadata and query the data without granting them full owner permissions. Which role should you assign at the Lake level?
roles/dataplex.dataViewer
This role is designed to allow read access to metadata and underlying data.
roles/bigquery.dataViewer
roles/dataplex.viewer
roles/dataplex.admin
You have sensitive data in Cloud Storage that needs to be deleted after 30 days to comply with regulatory requirements. What is the most efficient way to manage this?
Use Cloud Storage lifecycle management policies
Lifecycle rules are the native and most efficient way to handle object expiration.
Run a manual BigQuery script
Write a Cloud Function to check dates and delete files
Create a Dataplex lifecycle task
You need to ensure that PII (Personally Identifiable Information) in BigQuery is automatically detected and tagged across your organization. Which Dataplex feature should you enable on your Lake?
Automatic data discovery
Data discovery scans the underlying storage to detect and label data.
Data quality task
Lifecycle management policy
IAM policy inheritance
Which service should you use to search for and discover datasets across your entire Google Cloud organization?
BigQuery Explorer
Cloud Storage Browser
Cloud Logging
Data Catalog
Data Catalog allows centralized search and metadata discovery.
You need to control access to specific columns in a BigQuery table using Dataplex-integrated policy tags. What must you create before you can apply a policy tag to a column?
Data Zone
IAM Condition
BigQuery Dataset permission
Policy Tag Taxonomy
You must define the taxonomy and the specific tags within it first.
You are migrating data into a Dataplex Lake. You need to ensure that the data is partitioned by date to improve query performance. Where do you define this partitioning?
At the Zone level
At the Lake level
In the IAM policy
At the Asset level
Assets represent the physical data; partitioning is defined here.
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Practice this domainYou are orchestrating a pipeline with Workflows that invokes several Cloud Functions. You need to pass the output of one function as an argument to the next. What is the correct syntax?
Use global environment variables to store intermediate state.
Assign the call result to a variable and reference it in the next step.
Workflows allows assigning results to variables for use in subsequent steps.
Combine all function calls into a single synchronous block.
Write the output to a temporary GCS file and read it back.
In a Cloud Composer DAG, you need to trigger a BigQuery job that runs as a service account other than the one assigned to the GKE nodes. How should you implement this?
Hardcode the credentials in a JSON file inside the DAG folder.
Use the 'impersonation_chain' parameter in the BigQueryInsertJobOperator.
This is the secure way to perform service account impersonation in Airflow operators.
Change the worker node's identity in the Cloud Console.
Configure a connection with the 'Service Account Key' type in Airflow UI.
You need to run a task in Cloud Composer only if the previous task failed. Which Trigger Rule should you use?
none_failed
always
all_success
one_failed
This trigger rule executes if any parent task failed.
When configuring a Workflows execution, you want to ensure the workflow can be triggered by an HTTP POST request. Which feature allows this?
Executing the workflow via the REST API.
The Workflows API endpoint accepts POST requests to trigger executions.
Configuring a Cloud Scheduler job with an HTTP target.
Enabling the 'HTTP Gateway' on the workflow itself.
Creating a Service Account with 'Public Access'.
Your organization uses Workflows to orchestrate multi-step API calls. You need to handle transient failures in a specific HTTP request by retrying it up to 5 times with exponential backoff. Which block should you use?
A 'loop' block with a counter increment.
An 'if' statement checking for 500 status codes.
A global 'exception' handler at the end of the workflow.
A 'try' block with a 'retry' policy.
The retry block handles exceptions and allows defining custom parameters like max_retries and backoff.
A Cloud Composer DAG is failing because the Airflow database is locking up during high-concurrency periods. What is the most effective way to address this?
Delete all past DAG run logs.
Increase the number of DAGs in the repository.
Scale up the Cloud Composer environment size to increase database resources.
Composer environment sizes (e.g., small to medium) include higher-tier database resources.
Set the 'parallelism' parameter to a very high value.
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Practice this domainYou need to store sensitive data in GCS. Which feature ensures data is encrypted at rest?
Default Encryption
GCS provides default encryption at rest for all stored objects.
Identity and Access Management
Cloud DLP
Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK)
Which GCS storage class is most cost-effective for data accessed only once per year?
Standard
Coldline
Archive
Archive is the cheapest for very infrequent access.
Nearline
You are designing a streaming pipeline in Dataflow. You need to ensure that data is processed in the order it was generated, even if it arrives late. What do you use?
Processing time triggers
Watermarks and Allowed Lateness
Watermarks track progress and allowed lateness handles data arriving after the watermark.
Dataflow shuffle service
Fixed windows only
You need to load CSV files from GCS to BigQuery. The schema changes frequently. Which approach handles schema evolution automatically?
Dataprep with rigid recipe
Cloud Functions with manual schema mapping
Dataflow with fixed schema
BigQuery Load job with auto-detect
Load jobs with auto-detect enabled adapt to schema changes in CSV files.
You need to perform data cleansing on a large dataset in Dataprep. Which execution engine should you choose for scalability?
Local Desktop
BigQuery
Cloud Run
Dataflow
Dataflow provides the distributed processing needed for large-scale Dataprep jobs.
You need to ingest data from an external API that requires an OAuth token. Which tool is best for executing this periodically?
Pub/Sub
Cloud Functions
Cloud Functions allows custom code to handle OAuth and API interactions.
BigQuery Data Transfer Service
Storage Transfer Service
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Practice this domainThe GCP-ADP exam has 200 questions and must be completed in 120 minutes. The passing score is 700/1000.
Scenario-based questions covering exam objectives with detailed answer explanations.
The exam covers 4 domains: Data Analysis And Presentation, Data Management, Data Pipeline Orchestration, Data Preparation And Ingestion. Questions are weighted by domain — higher-weight domains appear more on your actual exam.
No. These are original exam-style practice questions written against the official Google Cloud GCP-ADP exam objectives. They are not copied from the real exam. Courseiva focuses on genuine understanding, not memorisation of braindumps.
Courseiva tracks your accuracy per domain and routes you toward weak areas automatically. Free, no account required.