About This Flashcard Deck
This flashcard deck contains 10 cards covering key Database Engineer concepts for the PCDBE exam. Test your GCP database knowledge. Use active recall by attempting to answer each question before revealing the answer.
Question
What is AlloyDB?
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Answer
Fully managed PostgreSQL-compatible database with Spanner-like performance. 4x faster than standard PostgreSQL for transactional workloads.
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All Database Engineer Flashcards
Q: What is AlloyDB?
A: Fully managed PostgreSQL-compatible database with Spanner-like performance. 4x faster than standard PostgreSQL for transactional workloads.
Q: What is Cloud Spanner?
A: Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, strongly consistent relational database. Supports SQL and automatic sharding.
Q: What is Database Migration Service?
A: Managed migration service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle to Cloud SQL/AlloyDB. Supports continuous replication.
Q: What is the difference between Firestore and Bigtable?
A: Firestore: document DB, mobile/web, serverless, offline support. Bigtable: wide-column, massive scale, high throughput, no SQL queries.
Q: What is Cloud SQL HA?
A: Regional instance with synchronous replication to a standby. Automatic failover. ~60 seconds recovery time.
Q: What is a Spanner instance?
A: A Spanner instance allocates compute resources (processing units or nodes). Databases live within instances.
Q: What is Query Insights?
A: Cloud SQL feature that provides query performance analysis: top queries, query plans, and recommendations.
Q: What is point-in-time recovery?
A: Restore a database to a specific point using binary logs (Cloud SQL) or backups. Useful for recovering from accidental data changes.
Q: What is Memorystore?
A: Managed Redis and Memcached. Used for caching, session management, and low-latency data access alongside relational databases.
Q: What is IAM database authentication?
A: Authenticate to Cloud SQL/AlloyDB using IAM instead of username/password. More secure, centralized, and auditable.
GCP Flashcard Study Approach
Google Cloud exams emphasise service selection and architecture decisions. Use these flashcards to build instant recall of GCP service capabilities, then apply that knowledge to scenario-based practice questions. Pay special attention to cards about managed vs. unmanaged services and serverless options — GCP strongly favours managed and serverless architectures in their exam scenarios.