GCP Database Engineer key terms

A globally distributed, horizontally scalable relational database service that provides strong consistency and high availability through synchronous replication across regions.

A globally synchronized clock API used by Cloud Spanner to assign commit timestamps with bounded uncertainty, enabling external consistency without relying on a single leader.

The strongest isolation level, ensuring that transactions appear to execute in the order of their commit timestamps, even across globally distributed replicas.

A Cloud Spanner schema feature where child rows are physically co-located with parent rows, reducing latency for joins and improving locality for hierarchical data.

A Cloud Spanner instance setting that replicates data across multiple regions for higher availability and lower read latency, with defined read-write and read-only regions.

A Cloud Spanner instance setting that keeps all replicas within a single region, offering lower cost and latency but less resilience to regional failures.

A fully managed relational database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server that handles backups, replication, patching, and failover.

A Cloud SQL setup with a primary and standby instance in different zones, enabling automatic failover if the primary becomes unavailable.

A read-only copy of a database instance that offloads read traffic from the primary and can be promoted to a standalone instance.

The automatic or manual process of switching database operations from a failed primary instance to a standby or replica to restore service.

A connector that provides secure, IAM-based access to Cloud SQL instances without requiring authorized networks or SSL configuration.

An internal IP address assigned to a database instance within a VPC network, allowing connectivity without exposing the instance to the public internet.

A networking connection between two VPC networks that enables private IP communication, often used to connect applications to managed database services.

A mechanism to access Google Cloud services privately from a VPC using internal IP addresses and endpoint attachments, without exposing traffic to the internet.

A fully managed, wide-column NoSQL database designed for large analytical and operational workloads with low latency and high throughput.

The practice of choosing Bigtable row keys that distribute data evenly and support efficient query patterns, avoiding hotspots.

A performance issue in Bigtable where uneven row key distribution causes some nodes to handle disproportionate traffic, increasing latency.

A client interface compatible with Apache HBase that allows existing HBase applications to work with Cloud Bigtable with minimal changes.

A group of Bigtable nodes that serve a single instance; multiple clusters in different zones or regions provide high availability and failover.

The process of copying data from a primary database to one or more replicas to improve availability, read scalability, or disaster recovery.

A serverless, document-oriented NoSQL database with real-time synchronization and offline support for mobile and web applications.

A Firestore operating mode that provides backward compatibility with Cloud Datastore APIs and behavior for existing applications.

A database index that includes multiple fields, required in Firestore and Datastore to support complex queries with filters and sorting.

A serverless, highly scalable data warehouse that supports SQL analytics over large datasets using columnar storage and distributed processing.

A unit of computational capacity in BigQuery that determines how much query processing power is available to a project or reservation.

A BigQuery capacity commitment that allocates a fixed number of slots to a project or organization for predictable performance and cost.

A BigQuery table organization technique that divides data into segments by date, ingestion time, or integer range to improve query performance and manage costs.

A BigQuery table organization technique that sorts data by one or more columns to improve filter and aggregation performance.

A fully managed service that migrates databases from on-premises or other clouds to Cloud SQL or Cloud Spanner with minimal downtime.

A migration approach that replicates ongoing changes from the source database to the destination while the source remains active, minimizing downtime.

A migration where the source and destination database engines are the same, simplifying schema and code conversion.

A migration between different database engines, requiring schema conversion and application changes to accommodate differences in SQL dialects and features.

A technique that captures and propagates row-level changes from a source database to a target system in near real time.

A serverless change data capture and replication service that streams changes from databases to Google Cloud destinations like BigQuery or Cloud Storage.

A physical device used to transfer large datasets to Google Cloud when network transfer is too slow or costly.

A service that moves or copies data from online sources, other clouds, or on-premises storage to Google Cloud Storage.

A centralized dashboard that provides fleet-wide visibility into the health, security, and performance of Google Cloud database services.

A monitoring feature that provides query-level performance metrics and recommendations for Cloud SQL and other databases.

A service for collecting metrics, logs, and events from Google Cloud resources and applications, enabling alerting and dashboards.

A service for storing, searching, and analyzing logs from Google Cloud services and applications, useful for auditing and troubleshooting databases.

Records of administrative and data access activities in Google Cloud, used for security analysis and compliance.

Identity and Access Management, a system that controls who can perform actions on Google Cloud resources through roles and permissions.

A special Google Cloud account used by applications or virtual machines to authenticate and authorize API calls.

The process of creating copies of database data and recovering it in case of data loss or corruption, often automated in managed services.

A feature that allows restoring a database to a specific timestamp, typically using continuous backups or transaction logs.

A column or set of columns that uniquely identifies each row in a table and enforces entity integrity.