Design innovative, scalable, and highly available cloud database solutions →easyMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped
PCDE Practice Question: Design innovative, scalable, and highly available cloud database solutions
A financial services company is migrating a legacy on-premises OLTP application to Google Cloud. The application requires high transaction rates (thousands per second), strict ACID compliance, and the ability to scale horizontally across multiple regions with strong consistency. Which Google Cloud database service should the company choose?
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 a globally distributed, horizontally scalable relational database service that provides ACID transactions and strong consistency across regions. It is ideal for OLTP workloads that require high throughput, consistency, and global scalability.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Bigtable
Why it's wrong here
Bigtable is a NoSQL wide-column database, not relational, and does not support ACID transactions or SQL queries.
- ✗
Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL
Why it's wrong here
Cloud SQL is a single-region managed relational database with limited scaling (up to 64 vCPU). It cannot scale horizontally across regions.
- ✗
Firestore
Why it's wrong here
Firestore is a NoSQL document database with limited transaction support and eventual consistency, not suitable for ACID-compliant OLTP.
- ✓
Cloud Spanner
Why this is correct
Spanner provides global distribution, strong consistency, ACID transactions, and horizontal scaling, meeting all OLTP requirements.
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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.