Cloud Digital Leader Google Cloud Products and Services Practice Question
An e-commerce company needs a globally distributed relational database with strong consistency and 99.999% SLA to handle customer orders and inventory across multiple regions. They require SQL compatibility and automatic replication. Which database should they use?
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 is a globally distributed relational database with strong consistency, high availability (99.999% SLA), and SQL support, perfect for multi-region transactional workloads.
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 Spanner
Why this is correct
Cloud Spanner is a fully managed relational database that combines the semantics of traditional SQL with horizontal scaling across regions. Using TrueTime, it provides external consistency (strong global consistency) while replicating data across continents, and it offers a 99.999% multi-region SLA. For an e-commerce platform needing global transactions on relational tables, Spanner uniquely satisfies both relational constraints and global distribution.
- ✗
Bigtable
Why it's wrong here
Bigtable is a wide-column NoSQL database optimized for high throughput, key-based access on massive datasets, but it does not support relational structures like foreign keys or joins, nor full ACID transactions across rows. Although it can be replicated across regions, it is not a relational database, so it cannot serve as the source of truth for transactional e-commerce order and inventory data.
- ✗
Cloud SQL
Why it's wrong here
Cloud SQL is a regional relational database service (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server) with high availability within a single region, but its primary and read replicas are anchored to one region or at best a few, and it requires manual replication for cross-region reads. It cannot natively distribute writes globally with strong consistency, making it unsuitable for a globally distributed, low-latency relational system.
- ✗
Firestore
Why it's wrong here
Firestore is a flexible-schema, document-oriented NoSQL database that synchronizes mobile and web clients, but it is not relational; it lacks SQL joins, multi-table transactions, and foreign-key constraints. While Firestore can replicate to multiple locations, it uses an eventual consistency mode in certain configurations and does not provide the strong SQL semantics required by a core e-commerce relational dataset.
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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
Availability
Availability is the measure of how often a system or service is operational and accessible when needed, typically expressed as a percentage of uptime.
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