Google PCA Ensure solution and operations reliability Practice Question
A company uses Cloud Spanner for a global financial application. They experience increased latency and transaction aborts during peak hours. Which measure should they take first to improve reliability?
⚠ Common exam trap
Google Cloud often tests the misconception that scaling nodes (Option A) is the universal fix for performance issues, but the trap here is that Spanner's horizontal scaling does not resolve lock contention—it only increases parallelism, which can worsen contention if transactions are not optimized.
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
✓
Optimize transactions to reduce lock contention.
Transaction aborts and latency in Cloud Spanner are most commonly caused by lock contention during peak hours. By optimizing transactions—such as reducing their scope, using read-only transactions where possible, and avoiding hot-spot writes—you directly address the root cause of contention without incurring additional cost or schema changes. This aligns with Google's best practices for Spanner reliability.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the number of nodes in the Spanner instance.
Why it's wrong here
Adding nodes increases capacity but does not directly reduce contention-induced aborts.
- ✗
Reduce the number of indexes on frequently updated columns.
Why it's wrong here
Fewer indexes reduce write overhead but not transaction aborts due to contention.
- ✓
Optimize transactions to reduce lock contention.
Why this is correct
Short, single-partition transactions reduce the chance of conflicts and aborts.
- ✗
Use interleaved tables to co-locate related data.
Why it's wrong here
Interleaving improves join performance but does not directly reduce contention.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to Google Cloud Platform
Key term
Latency
Latency is the time delay between a request being sent over a network and the response being received, often measured in milliseconds.
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.
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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.