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PROFESSIONAL-DATA-ENGINEER · Question #215

Your United States-based company has created an application for assessing and responding to user actions. The primary table's data volume grows by 250,000 records per second. Many third parties use yo

The correct answer is B. Implement Cloud Spanner with the leader in North America and read-only replicas in Asia and Europe.. Cloud Spanner is the only option that satisfies all three requirements simultaneously: it offers a single global endpoint, full ANSI SQL 2011 support, and external consistency (the strongest form of consistency), ensuring every read reflects the latest committed write regardless

Submitted by asante_acc· Mar 30, 2026Designing data processing systems

Question

Your United States-based company has created an application for assessing and responding to user actions. The primary table's data volume grows by 250,000 records per second. Many third parties use your application's APIs to build the functionality into their own frontend applications. Your application's APIs should comply with the following requirements: Single global endpoint ANSI SQL support Consistent access to the most up-to-date data What should you do?

Options

  • AImplement BigQuery with no region selected for storage or processing.
  • BImplement Cloud Spanner with the leader in North America and read-only replicas in Asia and Europe.
  • CImplement Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL with the master in Norht America and read replicas in Asia and Europe.
  • DImplement Cloud Bigtable with the primary cluster in North America and secondary clusters in Asia and Europe.

How the community answered

(64 responses)
  • A
    8% (5)
  • B
    70% (45)
  • C
    5% (3)
  • D
    17% (11)

Explanation

Cloud Spanner is the only option that satisfies all three requirements simultaneously: it offers a single global endpoint, full ANSI SQL 2011 support, and external consistency (the strongest form of consistency), ensuring every read reflects the latest committed write regardless of which region serves the request. Its multi-region configuration with a North American leader and read-only replicas in Asia and Europe also handles the 250,000 records/second write volume at global scale.

A is wrong because BigQuery is an analytics data warehouse optimized for batch/OLAP queries - not a transactional database capable of consistent, low-latency writes at 250K records/second. C is wrong because Cloud SQL is a regional managed database with no single global endpoint, and its read replicas are asynchronous (eventually consistent, not strongly consistent). D is wrong because Cloud Bigtable is a NoSQL wide-column store with no ANSI SQL support - it uses an HBase-compatible API, immediately disqualifying it.

Memory tip: Think "Spanner spans the globe" - whenever an exam question demands all three of (global single endpoint + SQL + strong consistency), Cloud Spanner is the answer. If any one of those three is missing from the requirements, reconsider; but when all three appear together, nothing else on GCP fits.

Topics

#Cloud Spanner#Global Consistency#High Transactional Throughput#Database Selection

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