PMLE Sliding Windows Practice Question
A team is building a feature pipeline for an ML model. They need to compute aggregate features over a sliding time window from streaming data. Which Google Cloud service is most appropriate for this task?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates might confuse fixed windows with sliding windows. Cloud Dataflow supports both, but to meet the requirement the option must explicitly specify sliding windows, not fixed windows.
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 Dataflow with sliding windows
Cloud Dataflow, based on Apache Beam, natively supports sliding time windows, making it the appropriate service for computing aggregate features over overlapping time intervals from streaming data. Fixed windows alone would not satisfy the sliding-window requirement, and the other services lack native sliding window aggregation capabilities.
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 Dataflow with sliding windows
Why this is correct
Cloud Dataflow supports sliding windows (e.g., via the SlidingWindows transform in Beam), making it suitable for computing aggregates over overlapping time intervals. The option text says 'fixed windows', but the service itself can handle sliding windows.
- ✗
Cloud Pub/Sub for windowing logic
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Pub/Sub is a messaging service for streaming data ingestion; it does not provide windowing logic or compute features.
- ✗
BigQuery scheduled queries
Why it's wrong here
BigQuery scheduled queries are batch-oriented and cannot process real-time streaming data with sliding windows.
- ✗
Cloud Functions with Pub/Sub triggers
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Functions with Pub/Sub triggers can react to individual events but lack native support for stateful sliding-window aggregations.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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