Design innovative, scalable, and highly available cloud database solutions →mediumMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped
PCDE Practice Question: Design innovative, scalable, and highly available cloud database solutions
A company wants to run complex analytical queries on terabytes of sales data with sub-second query response times for dashboards. Data is updated frequently in near real-time. Which combination of services is most appropriate?
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
✓
AlloyDB with columnar engine
AlloyDB with its columnar engine supports both high-speed transactions and fast analytical queries on the same data, fulfilling near-real-time analytics requirements.
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 Spanner with interleaved tables
Why it's wrong here
Spanner is for globally distributed OLTP; analytical queries are not its strength.
- ✓
AlloyDB with columnar engine
Why this is correct
AlloyDB combines transactional and analytical workloads with columnar engine for fast analytics.
- ✗
Cloud SQL for MySQL with read replicas
Why it's wrong here
Read replicas improve read throughput but analytical queries on MySQL are slow for terabytes.
- ✗
Bigtable with aggregation queries
Why it's wrong here
Bigtable supports key-value lookups, not complex analytical queries.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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.