Google Professional Cloud Database Engineer Exam Practice Questions (P. 2)

GPT-4o - Answer

To connect a Bare Metal Solution (BMS) environment to the internet for updates, setting up a Cloud NAT gateway on a Compute Engine VM, as per the Google Cloud documentation, is the recommended approach. This setup allows the BMS to access the internet via a managed NAT service provided on a VM, ensuring control and security while enabling the necessary updates. While Cloud NAT service is another viable option, the specific mention in the documentation of using a Cloud NAT gateway on a VM clarifies its preferred use for BMS environments.

GPT-4o - Answer

Monitoring the primary resources is fundamental when diagnosing performance issues in MySQL operating under Cloud SQL. By utilizing Cloud Monitoring, you can effectively pinpoint the root causes like CPU saturation, excessive storage use, or memory constraints. This approach is not just about seeing what went haywire but understanding how close you are to hit performance limits, which impacts the overall health and response of the database. This is what makes monitoring the key, rather than delving into logs or error reports which might not show real-time resource stats.

GPT-4o - Answer

For a company extending globally while needing to maintain a relational schema, Cloud Spanner is the optimal choice. It supports a relational database structure and ensures minimal latency through its multi-region capabilities. This infrastructure allows for seamless global scaling and high availability, meeting the prerequisites of handling worldwide transactions efficiently.

GPT-4o - Answer

Setting up your maintenance window when no users are active is a simple and effective method to ensure your application remains available during key operational hours. Specifically, in scenarios where application usage is predictably low, such as overnight periods for users in the same time zone, scheduling updates during these windows minimizes impact and avoids downtime. This ensures that essential updates occur without disrupting user experience, aligning maintenance with off-peak hours. Additionally, controlling the order of updates by prioritizing non-production instances before production ones further ensures stability and reduces risks during rollout.

GPT-4o - Answer

Increasing the primary instance's resources, such as vCPUs and disk capacity, can seem like a sound way to handle increased loads leading to replication lag; however, this isn't typically the most direct or effective first step. More commonly, addressing issues like query optimization or setting appropriate replication configurations targets the root cause of replication lags in scenarios of high workload transitions. Optimal query performance reduces the processing workload on the primary, allowing the replicas to catch up more efficiently. Users might observe better improvements in replication lag by reevaluating the query and schema optimizations before scaling hardware resources.