Google PCA Practice Question: Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes
A startup is designing a real-time leaderboard for a multiplayer game. The leaderboard must update within seconds of a score change and handle millions of concurrent players. Strong consistency is not required, but availability is critical. Which database is most suitable?
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 Bigtable
Cloud Bigtable is optimized for high-throughput, low-latency reads and writes, and can serve as a leaderboard backend if row keys are designed properly. It offers eventual consistency, which is acceptable here. Cloud Spanner provides strong consistency but is more expensive and may have higher latency. Firestore is good for real-time updates but may not handle millions of concurrent updates easily. Memorystore (Redis) can also do leaderboards but is not a database for persistent storage; it's a cache.
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 Memorystore
Why it's wrong here
Memorystore (Redis) is great for caching but not a durable database; data loss possible.
- ✗
Cloud Spanner
Why it's wrong here
Spanner provides strong consistency, which is not required, and is more costly.
- ✗
Cloud Firestore
Why it's wrong here
Firestore is real-time but may not scale to millions of concurrent writes without sharding.
- ✓
Cloud Bigtable
Why this is correct
Bigtable offers high throughput and low latency for simple key-value operations like leaderboards, and eventual consistency is acceptable.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to Google Cloud Platform
Key term
Bigtable
Bigtable is Google's fully managed, scalable NoSQL database service designed for large analytical and operational workloads, handling petabytes of data with low latency.
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 955-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 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.