Question 1hardmultiple choice
Full question →Question 38 of 300
hardmultiple choiceObjective-mapped
ACE Practice Question: A financial trading platform must support…
This ACE practice question tests your understanding of a financial trading platform must support…. Read the scenario carefully and evaluate each option against the stated constraints before committing to an answer. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A financial trading platform must support globally distributed, strongly consistent SQL transactions at thousands of writes per second, with no downtime for planned maintenance. Which GCP database service meets all these requirements?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.
A
Distractor review
Cloud Bigtable
Bigtable offers massive scalability for analytics workloads but doesn't support SQL or full ACID transactions required by a financial trading platform.
B
Distractor review
Cloud Firestore
Cloud Firestore provides strong consistency for document operations but doesn't support SQL queries or the write throughput of a high-frequency trading platform.
C
Best answer
Cloud Spanner
Cloud Spanner uniquely combines externally consistent ACID transactions, horizontal write scalability, SQL support, and a 99.999% SLA — all required for financial trading platforms.
D
Distractor review
Cloud SQL with synchronous read replicas
Cloud SQL scales reads with replicas but doesn't scale writes horizontally — it's limited to vertical scaling for write throughput.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
Many certification questions include familiar terms but test a specific constraint. Read the exact wording before choosing an answer that is generally true but wrong for this case.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
This question should be treated as a scenario, not a definition check. Identify the problem, the constraint and the best action. Then compare each option against those facts.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
- Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
- Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
- Use explanations to understand the rule behind the answer.
TExam Day Tips
- Underline the problem statement mentally.
- Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
- Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Related practice questions
Related ACE practice-question pages
Use these pages to review the topic behind this question. This is how one missed question becomes focused revision.
More questions from this exam
Keep practising from the same exam bank, or move into a focused topic page if this question exposed a weak area.
Question 1
What is the correct order of the Google Cloud resource hierarchy from highest to lowest level?
Question 2
A compliance archive stores legal documents accessed at most once per quarter. Which Cloud Storage class minimizes storage cost while meeting that access pattern?
Question 3
Which gcloud command creates a Compute Engine VM named 'web-01' using the e2-medium machine type in zone us-central1-a?
Question 4
A team wants to receive an email alert when the average CPU utilization of VMs in a managed instance group exceeds 80% for more than 5 minutes. What should they create in Cloud Monitoring?
Question 5
A junior developer needs read-only access to all GCP resources in a project. Which IAM role grants the minimum permissions required?
Question 6
A startup creates its first Google Cloud project. Before deploying any paid resources, what must be linked to the project?
Practice this exam
Start a free ACE practice session
Short sessions build daily habit. Longer sessions build exam-day stamina. Try a timed session to simulate real conditions.
FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this ACE question test?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Cloud Spanner — Cloud Spanner is the only GCP database providing external consistency (the strongest consistency level), horizontal write scalability, a SQL interface, and 99.999% uptime SLA for multi-region configurations. Cloud SQL achieves high availability but not horizontal write scale. Bigtable scales but lacks SQL and full ACID transactions.
What should I do if I get this ACE question wrong?
Identify which ACE exam domain this question belongs to, then review the specific concept being tested. Practise related questions in that domain and focus on understanding why each wrong answer is tempting — not just why the correct answer is right.
About these practice questions
Courseiva creates original exam-style practice questions with explanations and wrong-answer analysis. It does not publish real exam questions, exam dumps, or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
Discussion
Loading comments…
Sign in to join the discussion.
This ACE 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 ACE exam.