Associate-Data-Practitioner Practice Exam Questions with Answers Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner (ADP Exam) Certification

Creatingmaterialized viewsis the best solution to improve dashboard loading time while ensuring that the data is as up-to-date as possible. Materialized views precompute and cache the results of complex joins and aggregations, significantly reducing query execution time for dashboards. They also automatically update as the underlying data changes, ensuring near real-time access to fresh data. This approach optimizes query performance and provides an efficient and scalable solution for streaming data dashboards.

For near real-time dashboards with slow queries involving joins and aggregations, Google recommends materialized views in BigQuery to precompute and refresh results automatically.

Option A: Scheduled queries compute intermediate results periodically, but they aren’t near real-time and require manual scheduling, adding latency.

Option B: Parameterized data types don’t address query performance for joins/aggregations; they’re for query flexibility, not optimization.

Option C: Disabling caching worsens performance by forcing full recomputation each time, contrary to the goal.

Comprehensive and Detailed In-Depth Explanation:

Predicting the likelihood of a click (binary outcome: click or no-click) requires a classification model. BigQuery ML supports this use case with logistic regression.

Option A: Linear regression predicts continuous values, not probabilities for binary outcomes.

Option B: Matrix factorization is for recommendation systems, not binary prediction.

Option C: Logistic regression predicts probabilities for binary classification (e.g., click likelihood), ideal for this scenario and supported in BigQuery ML.

UsingDataflowto subscribe to the Pub/Sub topic and transform the activity logs is the best approach for this scenario. Dataflow is a managed service designed for processing and transforming streaming data in real time. It allows you to aggregate metrics from the raw activity logs efficiently and load the transformed data into a BigQuery table for reporting. This solution ensures scalability, supports real-time processing, and enables querying of both raw and aggregated data in BigQuery, providing the flexibility and insights needed for the dashboard.

Implementingflow control on the subscribersallows the subscriber applications to manage message processing during activity spikes by controlling the rate at which messages are pulled and processed. This prevents overwhelming the subscribers and ensures that messages are acknowledged within the deadline. Flow control helps maintain the stability of your pipeline during high-traffic periods without dropping or delaying messages unnecessarily.

Comprehensive and Detailed In-Depth Explanation:

The priorities are data integrity, recoverability after a regional disaster, low RPO (minimal data loss), and low latency for primary operations. Let’s analyze:

Option A: Multi-region backups store point-in-time snapshots in a separate region. With automated backups and transaction logs, RPO can be near-zero (e.g., minutes), and recovery is possible post-disaster. Primary operations remain in one zone, minimizing latency.

Option B: Regional HA (failover to another zone) with hourly cross-region backups protects against zone failures, but hourly backups yield an RPO of up to 1 hour—too high for valuable data. Manual backup management adds overhead.

Option C: Synchronous replication to another zone ensures zero RPO within a region but doesn’t protect against regional loss. Latency increases slightly due to sync writes across zones.

Configuring aCloud Storage lifecycle ruleto automatically delete objects older than seven days is the best solution because:

Built-in feature: Cloud Storage lifecycle rules are specifically designed to manage object lifecycles, such as automatically deleting or transitioning objects based on age.

No additional setup: It requires no external services or custom code, reducing complexity and maintenance.

Cost-effective: It directly achieves the goal of deleting files after seven days without incurring additional compute costs.

To build a serverless data pipeline that processes data in real-time from Pub/Sub, transforms it, and stores it for SQL-based analysis using Looker, the best solution is to useDataflowandBigQuery.Dataflowis a fully managed service for real-time data processing and transformation, whileBigQueryis a serverless data warehouse that supports SQL-based querying and integrates seamlessly with Looker for data analysis and visualization. This combination meets the requirements for real-time streaming, transformation, and efficient storage for analytical queries.

Comprehensive and Detailed In-Depth Explanation:

BigQuery uses IAM for access control, adhering to least privilege by granting only necessary permissions.

Option A: IAM roles (e.g., roles/bigquery.dataViewer for read-only) restrict query access to authorized users, aligning with Google’s security best practices.

Option B: BigQuery doesn’t support SQL GRANT for dataset privileges; access is managed via IAM or authorized views.

Option C: Exporting to Cloud Storage with signed URLs bypasses BigQuery’s native controls and adds complexity.

Using BigQuery ML is the best solution in this case because:

Ease of use: BigQuery ML allows users to build machine learning models using SQL, which requires minimal ML expertise.

Integrated platform: Since the data already exists in BigQuery, there’s no need to move it to another service, saving time and engineering resources.

Logistic regression: This is an appropriate model for binary classification tasks like predicting the likelihood of a customer making a purchase in the next month.

Dataform workflowsare the ideal solution for migrating batch transformation pipelines to Google Cloud when you want to perform programmatic transformations using only SQL. Dataform allows you to define SQL-based workflows for data transformations and supports Git integration for version control, enabling collaboration and version tracking of your pipelines. This approach is purpose-built for SQL-driven data pipeline management and aligns perfectly with your requirements.

The solution must use SQL for transformations and integrate with Git for version control, focusing on batch pipelines. Let’s evaluate:

Option A: Cloud Data Fusion uses a visual UI with plugins, not SQL-only transformations. It lacks native Git integration (requires external tools), missing a key requirement.

Option B: Dataform is a SQL-based workflow tool for BigQuery transformations, defining pipelines as SQLX scripts. It integrates natively with Git for version control, supporting batch ELT processes with minimal overhead.

Option C: Cloud Composer uses Python DAGs and operators, not SQL-only transformations. Git is possible but not intrinsic to its workflow design.

Comprehensive and Detailed In-Depth Explanation:

Transferring 300 TB over a 100 Mbps connection would take an impractical amount of time (over 300 days at theoretical maximum speed, ignoring real-world constraints like latency). Google Cloud provides the Transfer Appliance for large-scale, time-sensitive transfers.

Option A: Cloud Client Libraries over the internet would be slow and unreliable for 300 TB due to bandwidth limitations.

Option B: The gcloud storage command is similarly constrained by internet speed and not designed for such large transfers.

Option C: Compressing and splitting across multiple providers adds complexity and isn’t a Google-supported method for Cloud Storage ingestion.

Using Database Migration Service (DMS) to replicate the MySQL database to a Cloud SQL for MySQL instance is the best approach. DMS is a fully managed service designed for migrating databases to Google Cloud with minimal downtime and cost. It supports continuous data replication, ensuring data integrity during the migration process, and handles schema and data transfer efficiently. This solution is particularly suited for large tables and transactional data, as it maintains real-time synchronization between the source and target databases, minimizing downtime for the migration.

Setting a table-level retention policy in BigQuery to seven years is the most efficient and cost-optimized solution to meet the regulatory requirement. A table-level retention policy ensures that the data cannot be deleted or overwritten before the specified retention period expires, providing compliance with auditing requirements while keeping the data within BigQuery for easy access and analysis. This approach avoids the complexity and additional costs of exporting data to Cloud Storage.

Usingauthorized viewsis the simplest and most secure way to grant the payroll specialist access to aggregated performance data without exposing the entire dataset. Authorized views allow you to create a view in BigQuery that contains only the query results for the aggregated performance data. The payroll specialist can query the view without being granted access to the underlying sensitive data. This approach ensures security, adheres to the principle of least privilege, and eliminates the need to manage complex row-level or column-level permissions.

roles/bigquery.jobUser:

This role allows a user or service account to run BigQuery jobs, including queries. This is necessary for the application to interact with and query the tables.

From Google Cloud documentation: "BigQuery Job User can run BigQuery jobs, including queries, load jobs, export jobs, and copy jobs."

roles/bigquery.dataOwner:

This role grants full control over BigQuery datasets and tables. It allows the service account to update tables, which is a requirement of the application.

From Google Cloud documentation: "BigQuery Data Owner can create, delete, and modify BigQuery datasets and tables. BigQuery Data Owner can also view data and run queries."

Why other options are incorrect:

B. roles/bigquery.connectionUser and roles/bigquery.dataViewer:

roles/bigquery.connectionUser is used for external connections, which is not required for this task. roles/bigquery.dataViewer only allows viewing data, not updating it.

C. roles/bigquery.admin:

roles/bigquery.admin grants excessive permissions. Following the principle of least privilege, this role is too broad.

D. roles/bigquery.user and roles/bigquery.filteredDataViewer:

roles/bigquery.user grants the ability to run queries, but not the ability to modify data. roles/bigquery.filteredDataViewer only provides permission to view filtered data, which is not sufficient for updating tables.

Principle of Least Privilege:

The principle of least privilege is a security concept that states that a user or service account should be granted only the permissions necessary to perform its intended tasks.

By assigning roles/bigquery.jobUser and roles/bigquery.dataOwner, we provide the application with the exact permissions it needs without granting unnecessary access.

Google Cloud Documentation References:

BigQuery IAM roles:https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/access-control-basic-roles

IAM best practices:https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/best-practices-for-using-iam

Enabling automatic backups and creating a read replica of the Cloud SQL instance is the best solution to improve read performance. Read replicas allow you to offload read traffic from the primary database instance, reducing its load and improving overall performance. This approach is cost-effective and easy to implement within Cloud SQL. It ensures that the primary instance focuses on write operations while replicas handle read queries, providing a seamless performance boost with minimal effort.

For regulatory requirements that mandate complete and manual control of data encryption, you should use customer-supplied encryption keys (CSEK). With CSEK, your company provides the encryption keys for data storage, and Google Cloud does not store or manage these keys. This approach ensures thatyour organization retains full control and responsibility over the encryption process, meeting strict regulatory compliance requirements.

UsingBigQuery's built-in functionsis the most effective and efficient way to clean the dataset directly within BigQuery. BigQuery provides powerful SQL capabilities to handle missing values, remove duplicates, and resolve formatting issues without needing to export data or create complex pipelines. This approach minimizes overhead and leverages the scalability of BigQuery for large datasets, making it an ideal solution for quickly addressing data quality issues.

Using BigQuery to batch load the data and perform cleaning and analysis with SQL is the best approach for this scenario. BigQuery provides powerful SQL capabilities to handle missing values, enforce correct data types, and remove duplicates efficiently. This method simplifies the pipeline by leveraging BigQuery’s built-in processing power for both cleaning and analysis, reducing the need for additional tools or services and minimizing complexity.

Using the"Pub/Sub to BigQuery" Dataflow template with a UDF (User-Defined Function)is the optimal choice because it combines near real-time processing, minimal code for transformations, and scalability. The UDF allows for efficient implementation of custom transformations, such as capitalizing letters in the serial number field, while Dataflow handles the rest of the managed pipeline seamlessly.

UsingNearline storagein Cloud Storage is the best option for data that is accessed infrequently (such as once a month) but must be readily available within seconds when needed. Nearline offers a balance between low storage costs and quick retrieval times, making it ideal for scenarios like monthly analysis of historical data. It is specifically designed for infrequent access patterns while avoiding the higher retrieval costs and longer access times of Coldline or Archive storage.