Professional Data EngineerDesigning data processing systemsEasy

A large e-commerce company needs to store customer order history, which can grow to petabytes of data. This data is primarily used for historical analysis, trend reporting, and machine learning model training. Queries are often complex, involving joins across many tables and aggregations over vast date ranges. The solution must be highly scalable, performant for analytical queries, and cost-effective for petabyte-scale storage. Which Google Cloud service is the most appropriate for this data warehousing requirement?

  1. ABigQuery
  2. BCloud Storage
  3. CCloud SQL
  4. DCloud Bigtable
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: A. BigQuery

BigQuery is a serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective enterprise data warehouse designed for petabyte-scale analytics. It excels at complex SQL queries, aggregations, and joins over massive datasets, making it the ideal choice for storing and analyzing customer order history for business intelligence and machine learning.

Why the other options are wrong

  • B. Cloud Storage is an object storage service, not a data warehouse. While it can store raw data, it does not provide the query capabilities of BigQuery.
  • C. Cloud SQL is a relational database suitable for transactional workloads, not petabyte-scale analytical data warehousing.
  • D. Cloud Bigtable is a NoSQL wide-column store optimized for high-throughput operational data, not for complex analytical SQL queries on structured data.

BigQuery for Data Warehousing

A fully managed, serverless enterprise data warehouse that enables super-fast SQL queries against petabytes of data using the power of Google's infrastructure.

  • Petabyte-scale analytical data warehouse.
  • Serverless and highly scalable.
  • Optimized for complex SQL queries and aggregations.
  • Cost-effective for large datasets.

Memory trick: BigQuery: Big data, big queries, big insights, big smiles!

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