Google PCA Practice Question: Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes
A company needs to choose between Cloud Spanner and Firestore for a global inventory application that requires strong consistency and horizontal scaling. The application has a fixed schema with complex joins. Which database is most appropriate?
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 and supports complex joins. Firestore is a NoSQL document database with eventual consistency (strong consistency only within a single document).
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
Spanner provides strong consistency, relational schema, joins, and horizontal scaling across regions.
- ✗
Firestore
Why it's wrong here
Firestore is NoSQL with limited support for complex joins and strong consistency only for single-document operations.
- ✗
Cloud SQL
Why it's wrong here
Cloud SQL is not globally distributed and cannot horizontally scale write throughput across regions.
- ✗
Cloud Bigtable
Why it's wrong here
Bigtable is a wide-column NoSQL store without support for joins or strong transactional consistency across rows.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to Google Cloud Platform
Key term
Cloud Spanner
Cloud Spanner is a fully managed, globally distributed relational database service from Google Cloud that combines the benefits of relational database structure with horizontal scalability and strong consistency.
Key term
Spanner
Google Cloud's globally distributed, strongly consistent, and horizontally scalable database service designed for mission-critical, transactional workloads.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PCA practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the PCA exam.