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Google PCA Practice Question: A financial services company requires a globally…
A financial services company requires a globally distributed relational database with strong consistency and horizontal scalability to serve a multi-region banking application. Write conflicts are rare. Which database should they choose?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap is confusing 'globally distributed' with 'eventually consistent' — candidates may pick Cloud SQL with replication or Bigtable, missing that only Spanner offers strong consistency plus horizontal scalability in a relational model.
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 Google's globally distributed, horizontally scalable, strongly consistent relational database. It uses TrueTime and Paxos to provide external consistency across regions, making it the only option that meets all three requirements: global distribution, strong consistency, and horizontal scalability for a relational workload.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Firestore in Native mode
Why it's wrong here
Firestore in Native mode is a document NoSQL store offering eventual consistency in multi-region configurations, so it cannot guarantee the strong consistency required. It is tempting for globally distributed mobile and web apps, but a relational workload with rare write conflicts fits Cloud Spanner instead.
- ✗
Cloud SQL with cross-region replication
Why it's wrong here
Cloud SQL replicates a single primary region; its read replicas are asynchronous and cannot accept writes, so it provides neither horizontal write scalability nor strong consistency across regions. It suits regional transactional workloads needing familiar PostgreSQL or MySQL with a standby for failover.
- ✗
Cloud Bigtable
Why it's wrong here
Bigtable is a wide-column NoSQL store offering eventual consistency and no relational schema, joins or multi-row transactions, so it cannot meet the relational and strong-consistency requirements. It suits high-throughput analytical or time-series workloads at petabyte scale where relational semantics are unnecessary.
- ✓
Cloud Spanner
Why this is correct
Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed relational database offering external consistency and horizontal scalability through TrueTime, meeting the strong-consistency and multi-region requirements. Cloud SQL and Cloud Bigtable lack either global relational semantics or strong consistency.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Data Migration and Transfer Services
Key term
Scalability
Scalability is the ability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources, either by making the existing resources more powerful (vertical scaling) or by adding more resources (horizontal scaling).
Key term
Spanner
Google Cloud's globally distributed, strongly consistent, and horizontally scalable database service designed for mission-critical, transactional workloads.
About these practice questions
This PCA question is part of Courseiva's 807-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Google Cloud exam blueprint
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.