Preparing for success with Google Cloud Professional Cloud Database Engineer Exam

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Google Cloud - Community

3 min readJan 3, 2023

Every company generates data. As you progress on your companies journey the amount of data increases. Companies can have different types of requirement to store data, and databases are a very important part of this.

If you are interested in learning more about various database options in Google Cloud the Google Professional Cloud Database Engineer certification is the right challenge for you.

The exam was feature in Beta in April 2022 and launched in live in July 2022. This live version covers:

Design scalable and highly available cloud database solutions
Manage a solution that can span multiple database solutions
Migrate data solutions
Deploy scalable and highly available databases in Google Cloud

To help you be successful at this exam, I’ve put together a few tips.

Step #1: Check out the Exam Guide

The exam guide lists all the objectives to be covered. It is very helpful and at a glance you have an idea of what areas you need to learn in order to prepare for the exam. You can check out the current exam guide here.

Step #2: Sign up for Google Cloud training

After you have reviewed the exam guide, i check out some of the Google Cloud learning material. At the time of writing this is the only official training available for this topics. Go to Google Cloud Skills Boost an en-roll in the Database Engineer learning path and begin learning.

Other resources:
Cousera: Google Cloud Database Engineer Specialization

Step #3: Hands-on Experience with Labs

There are several labs contained in the learning paths and you should aim to complete them. By completing the labs and quest you get the opportunity to earn skill badges.

You can also visit https://codelabs.developers.google.com/ search for any of these to focus on specific area (cloud sql, cloud spanner, bigtable, firestore, cloud datatstore, Big Query etc). You would see several codelabs you can do in your own environment to get more hands on practice. Remember to delete services when completed. While learning you can explore the various options that exist in a services configuration.

Step #4: Database Topic Deep Dives

The Google Cloud documentation is technical documentation. Here are a few of my recommendations for topics you can read up on.

I’ve also put together a prep sheet for this exam available on Start Cloud Now

PCDBE sheet link

Step #5 Sign up for the exam

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Please note Google Cloud released a new Database in 2022 called AlloyDB since you are on the topics of learning Database I think it’s best to check out the documentation on this new service. AlloyDB docs.

IMO this exam focuses on database options and is well suited for those who have an interested in the topics.

Also feel free to check out my other certification articles:

If you want to ask a question, find out more or share a thought? Please connect with me on Linkedin or twitter @ammettw and send me a message.

I’ll be in touch.