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Question 472 of 1,446

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

A company is migrating a relational database to Cloud Bigtable. The source schema has a customers table and an orders table with a foreign key. Which data model approach is recommended for Bigtable?

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

Denormalize and store orders as a column family within the customer row

Bigtable is a wide-column NoSQL database, so denormalization is recommended to avoid joins. Embedding order data within customer rows (or using a single table with composite keys) is common. Referential integrity is not enforced.

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

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

  • Create a view to join the tables

    Why it's wrong here

    Bigtable does not support views or joins.

  • Maintain two separate tables with foreign keys

    Why it's wrong here

    Bigtable does not support foreign keys or joins.

  • Use Cloud Spanner to maintain relational structure

    Why it's wrong here

    The customer chose Bigtable, not Spanner.

  • Denormalize and store orders as a column family within the customer row

    Why this is correct

    Denormalization is typical in Bigtable to read all related data in one row.

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Last reviewed: Jul 4, 2026

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