Objective 3.1
PDESelecting storage systems
Objective 3.1 sits in Storing the data, which carries 20% of the Data Engineer exam. The questions below are original, written from the official objective title above, and each explanation cites the Google Cloud page it rests on.
Objective title verbatim from the official objectives. Google Cloud exam page ↗
A worked example
Shown solved, with the whole explanation open: this is what every question here carries.
A team wants one table in a replicated Bigtable instance to live on a single cluster while the other tables replicate. What does the resource model allow?
Correct.
Concept
Where a resource sits in the containment hierarchy decides what can vary about it. An object owned by the container cannot take on per-member settings.
Why B
A table belongs to an instance, not to a cluster or node. In a replicated instance you cannot assign a table to one cluster, write per-cluster collection policies, or hold different data per cluster.
Source
Google Cloud: Bigtable instances, clusters, and nodes, checked August 2026A table belongs to an instance, not to a cluster or node. If you have an instance with more than one cluster, you are using replication. This means you can't assign a table to an individual cluster or create unique garbage collection policies for each cluster in an instance. You also can't make each cluster store a different set of data in the same table.
Now you: objective 3.1 questions
No account needed. The explanation opens when you answer.
Sample question 1 of 3
An organization created a Bigtable instance backed by HDD and now wants one new cluster on SSD for a latency-sensitive workload. What is possible?
Sample question 2 of 3
An engineer plans a Bigtable instance spanning several locations and asks how many clusters may sit in a single zone. What is the rule?
Sample question 3 of 3
A company adds a second cluster to a Bigtable instance that previously ran with only one. What happens to the data already stored?
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Read the sources
These are the official pages the questions above cite. Reading them is studying the objective from the primary source, which is what the explanations point you toward anyway.