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PCDE Practice Question: Design innovative, scalable, and highly available cloud database solutions
A retail company uses Cloud Bigtable for real-time inventory. They want to improve read performance for queries that filter by product category and last_updated timestamp. Which THREE row key design strategies should they adopt? (Choose 3)
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
✓
Use a reverse timestamp for time-based queries
Field promotion places frequently filtered attributes first. Salting with hash prefix distributes writes. Reverse timestamp ensures recent data is efficiently queried. A single monotonically increasing timestamp causes hotspots. Using a single column family doesn't affect row key.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Use a reverse timestamp for time-based queries
Why this is correct
Reverse timestamp enables efficient queries for recent data.
- ✓
Promote product_category to the first part of the row key
Why this is correct
Field promotion improves query efficiency for filtered attributes.
- ✗
Use a monotonically increasing timestamp as the first component
Why it's wrong here
Causes write hotspots.
- ✗
Store all data in a single column family
Why it's wrong here
Column families don't affect row key design.
- ✓
Add a hash prefix (salting) to distribute writes
Why this is correct
Salting prevents hotspots.
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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.