PCDE Practice Question: Manage a solution that can span multiple database technologies
A financial services company uses Cloud Bigtable for real-time fraud detection. They have a cluster with 10 nodes using HDD storage and are experiencing high latency due to disk throughput bottlenecks. They need to improve performance with minimal downtime. What should they do?
⚠ Common exam trap
The PCDOE exam often tests the misconception that you can change storage type in-place or that adding nodes solves all performance issues, but the key trap here is that HDD throughput is a hardware limitation that requires a new cluster with SSD to overcome.
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
✓
Create a new cluster with SSD storage, replicate data, then update the application to point to the new cluster
Cloud Bigtable does not support in-place conversion of storage from HDD to SSD. The only way to migrate to SSD storage is to create a new cluster with SSD, replicate data using Bigtable replication, and then update the application connection string to point to the new cluster. This approach minimizes downtime by allowing the old cluster to serve reads during replication.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Modify the existing cluster's storage type to SSD via the Cloud Console
Why it's wrong here
Storage type cannot be changed in-place; a new cluster is required.
- ✓
Create a new cluster with SSD storage, replicate data, then update the application to point to the new cluster
Why this is correct
Correct. A new cluster with SSD must be created. Use replication to keep data in sync, then cut over with minimal downtime.
- ✗
Use Cloud Bigtable's hot tablet detection to rebalance the data
Why it's wrong here
Hot tablet detection helps identify uneven load but does not change storage type.
- ✗
Increase the number of nodes in the existing cluster
Why it's wrong here
Adding nodes improves throughput but does not address the inherent HDD latency bottleneck.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every PCDE question from scratch — 1,446 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or 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 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.