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Question 557 of 1,446

PCDE Practice Question: Design innovative, scalable, and highly available cloud database solutions

A company is building a real-time leaderboard for a mobile game using Google Cloud. The data includes player scores that update frequently (thousands of writes per second) and queries for top 100 players. 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 a good fit for high write throughput and simple range scans (e.g., scanning top scores). Firestore has limited write capacity. Cloud SQL cannot handle thousands of writes per second. Spanner can but is overkill and more expensive.

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

  • BigQuery

    Why it's wrong here

    BigQuery is for analytics, not real-time leaderboard updates.

  • Cloud Bigtable

    Why this is correct

    Bigtable can handle high write volumes and read the top 100 rows efficiently via a prefix scan.

  • Cloud Firestore

    Why it's wrong here

    Firestore write limit is 10,000 writes/sec per database, but it is optimized for document queries, not high-throughput leaderboards.

  • Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL)

    Why it's wrong here

    Cloud SQL cannot sustain thousands of writes per second consistently.

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Last reviewed: Jul 4, 2026

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This PCDE 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 PCDE exam.