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PCDE Practice Question: Design innovative, scalable, and highly available cloud database solutions
A global e-commerce platform expects 50,000 concurrent users during flash sales, each performing short transactions like adding to cart and checking out. The database must provide strong transactional consistency across regions. Which Google Cloud database 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
✓
Cloud Spanner
Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed, strongly consistent relational database that can handle high-concurrency OLTP workloads with ACID transactions across regions. Cloud SQL is limited to single region and cannot meet global consistency requirements. Bigtable and Firestore are NoSQL and do not support strong ACID transactions natively.
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 Bigtable
Why it's wrong here
Bigtable is a NoSQL wide-column database designed for analytical and time-series workloads, not for transactional OLTP with ACID requirements.
- ✓
Cloud Spanner
Why this is correct
Spanner provides global distribution, strong consistency, and ACID transactions, making it ideal for high-concurrency OLTP across regions.
- ✗
Firestore
Why it's wrong here
Firestore is a NoSQL document database with eventual consistency by default and limited transaction support, not suitable for global OLTP with strong consistency.
- ✗
Cloud SQL (MySQL)
Why it's wrong here
Cloud SQL is a single-region relational database; it cannot provide the global distribution and strong consistency needed.
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