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 startup is building a ride-sharing application that requires globally distributed, strongly consistent transactions for ride matching and payments. The database must scale horizontally and provide low-latency reads and writes. Which Google Cloud database should they use?
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 the only Google Cloud database that provides global strong consistency, horizontal scaling, and supports ACID transactions across regions.
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 does not support ACID transactions across rows and is not strongly consistent across regions.
- ✗
Cloud SQL
Why it's wrong here
Cloud SQL provides strong consistency but does not natively support multi-region replication with strong consistency.
- ✓
Cloud Spanner
Why this is correct
Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed, strongly consistent relational database service with horizontal scaling.
- ✗
Firestore
Why it's wrong here
Firestore provides strong consistency per document but not cross-document transactions across regions.
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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.