Objective 3.2
PDEPlanning for using a data warehouse
Objective 3.2 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 partitions a fact table by day and finds each partition holds roughly two gigabytes, across tens of thousands of partitions. What is suggested instead?
Correct.
Concept
Dividing data too finely carries a cost of its own. Past a point, the bookkeeping about the divisions grows faster than the scan savings they deliver.
Why C
Clustering is suggested in place of partitioning where partitions hold roughly less than 10 GB each. Many small partitions increase table metadata and can affect metadata access times while querying.
Source
Google Cloud: Introduction to partitioned tables, checked August 2026Partitioning results in a small amount of data per partition (approximately less than 10 GB). Creating many small partitions increases the table's metadata, and can affect metadata access times when querying the table.
Now you: objective 3.2 questions
No account needed. The explanation opens when you answer.
Sample question 1 of 3
An analyst has a table with a few rows per day spread across twenty years, and workflows that update rows over hundreds of distinct dates. Which granularity is recommended?
Sample question 2 of 3
A company holds years of data in tables named with a date suffix and asks whether to keep that layout. What does a partitioned table offer over it?
Sample question 3 of 3
An engineer wants a table partitioned on both region and order date so that queries filtering either column prune. What does BigQuery allow?
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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.