Cloud Digital Leader Google Cloud Products and Services Practice Question
A financial services company needs a relational database with global strong consistency, horizontal scaling, and 99.999% availability SLA. Which database should they choose?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Cloud Spanner
Cloud Spanner offers global distribution, strong consistency, automatic horizontal scaling, and a 99.999% SLA. Cloud SQL does not scale globally, Firestore is NoSQL, and Bigtable lacks strong consistency.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Cloud Bigtable
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Bigtable is a wide-column NoSQL database, not a relational one, so it cannot provide the SQL queries, joins, and ACID transactions that a financial services application typically requires. While it offers high scalability and low latency, it does not support strong consistency across regions — multi-region replication is eventually consistent, which fails the global strong-consistency requirement. Its availability SLA (99.99%) also falls short of the 99.999% needed.
- ✓
Cloud Spanner
Why this is correct
Cloud Spanner is the only Google Cloud relational database that combines global scalability with strong consistency and ACID transactions, using synchronous replication and Paxos consensus across regions. It is specifically designed to deliver 99.999% availability SLA, meeting the financial services requirement for a globally distributed, strongly consistent relational database. With horizontal scaling and automatic sharding, it can handle massive transaction loads while maintaining external consistency.
- ✗
Cloud SQL
Why it's wrong here
Cloud SQL is a fully managed relational database service (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server) that supports up to 64 TB per instance and read replicas, but it is regionally scoped and cannot scale globally across multiple regions in a single database. It offers a 99.95% availability SLA (or 99.99% with high availability), which does not meet the 99.999% SLA requirement. For a global financial application needing strong consistency across continents, Cloud Spanner is the appropriate choice.
- ✗
Firestore
Why it's wrong here
Firestore is a NoSQL document database, not a relational one, and it stores data in flexible documents rather than tables with rows and columns. In multi-region mode, Firestore provides strong consistency for single-region deployments, but multi-region mode uses eventual consistency for queries and transactions, which fails the strong-consistency requirement. It also offers a 99.99% availability SLA, which is below the 99.999% target, and lacks the full SQL and relational integrity features required by financial systems.
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Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
SQL
SQL is a standard programming language used to manage, query, and manipulate relational databases by issuing commands like SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE.
Key term
Firestore
Firestore is a flexible, scalable, serverless NoSQL database from Google Cloud that automatically syncs data across applications in real time.
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