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PCDE Practice Question: Design innovative, scalable, and highly available cloud database solutions
You are designing a schema for Cloud Spanner and need to model a one-to-many relationship between Customers and Orders. Which THREE features or practices should you consider? (Choose three.)
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 secondary index on Orders.customer_id to speed up queries
Spanner supports parent-child interleaving for efficient joins, and secondary indexes with STORING clause for covering queries. Foreign keys are not enforced. Using monotonically increasing keys is discouraged.
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 foreign key constraint to ensure referential integrity
Why it's wrong here
Spanner does not enforce foreign keys; application must handle it.
- ✗
Use a monotonically increasing integer as the primary key for Orders
Why it's wrong here
Monotonically increasing keys can cause hotspots.
- ✓
Create a secondary index on Orders.customer_id to speed up queries
Why this is correct
Secondary index on the foreign key column improves query performance.
- ✓
Use the STORING clause in indexes to include frequently queried columns
Why this is correct
STORING clause creates covering indexes, reducing the need to read the base table.
- ✓
Use parent-child interleaving with Customers as parent and Orders as child
Why this is correct
Interleaving stores child rows with parent rows for fast joins.
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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.