PDEGoogle Cloud Professional Data Engineer
What the exam covers
Study guide
From Google
About PDE
Data systems on Google Cloud: Pub/Sub and Dataflow for streaming, Dataproc and Data Fusion for batch, BigQuery design and cost, storage choices, orchestration with Composer, and governance with Dataplex and IAM.
Who it's for. Data engineers designing pipelines and warehouses on Google Cloud.
How to prepare
- BigQuery is the centre of the exam: partitioning vs clustering, slots vs on-demand, materialised views and authorised views.
- Know Dataflow windowing, triggers and how it handles late data and exactly-once processing.
- Bigtable row key design and hotspotting come up regularly.
Sample PDE questions
Try these with the answers on the page, then practise the full bank.
- A healthcare insurer runs claims, membership, and provider network teams that each generate large datasets. Leadership wants each team to control its own data, while other teams can find and consume those datasets across the company. Which operating model fits this goal best? Designing data processing systems
- A retailer's MySQL order database must feed BigQuery with inserts, updates, and deletes within a few minutes. The team wants no custom code that tracks binary log positions. Which managed service should the data engineer choose? Ingesting and processing data
- A payments service publishes ledger events for thousands of accounts and needs each account's events handled in sequence. What guarantee do Pub/Sub ordering keys provide? Ingesting and processing data
- A nightly job loads sales records for business date D. Late records for date D keep arriving over the following days and must land in the correct date partition. Reruns after a failure must never double count. Which approach should the team use? Ingesting and processing data
- A streaming job uses event-time windows, and events sometimes arrive several minutes late. What does the watermark tell the pipeline? Ingesting and processing data
- A SaaS startup runs an order-management application that needs a managed PostgreSQL database with automated backups, point-in-time recovery and automatic maintenance. It does not need writes in multiple regions. Which service is the best fit? Storing data
- A logistics manager wants a Looker Studio scorecard to reflect shipments as they land in a BigQuery table, with no manual steps in between. Which data source configuration should be chosen? Preparing and using data for analysis
- A streaming pipeline stopped processing at 2 a.m. The on-call engineer must find the error messages written by the workers and also check the throughput and backlog graphs for the same time window. Which pair of services is most appropriate? Maintaining and automating workloads
- All 69 sample questions
Questions people ask
Is this PDE practice exam free?
Yes. All 474 questions, the timed mock exam and the explanations are free, and there's no account to create.
Are these real exam questions?
No. Real exam questions are confidential under the Google Cloud candidate agreement. These are practice questions written to cover the same domains in the same scenario style, each with an explanation of why the answer is right.
How is the PDE mock exam scored?
Questions are drawn from every domain in proportion to the exam guide, and you get a raw percentage with a breakdown by domain. Google Cloud uses scaled scoring, so treat 75% or more here as a sign you're ready rather than a predicted score.
Where is my progress saved?
In your browser, on this device. Nothing is sent to us apart from the answers you check, and clearing site data resets it.