Associate-Data-Practitioner Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner (ADP Exam) Questions and Answers

Using Analytics Hub to create a listing on a private data exchange for each partner dataset is the Google-recommended practice for securely sharing BigQuery data with external partners. Analytics Hub allows you to manage data sharing at scale, enabling partners to query datasets directly without needing to copy the data into their own projects. By creating separate listings for each partner dataset and allowing only the respective partner to subscribe, you ensure that partners can access only their specific data, adhering to the principle of least privilege. This approach is secure, efficient, and designed for scenarios involving external data sharing.

In BigQuery ML, when creating a logistic regression model to predict customer churn, the correct query should:

Exclude the target label column (in this case, churned) from the feature columns, as it is used for training and not as a feature input.

Rename the target label column to label, as BigQuery ML requires the target column to be named label.

The chosen query satisfies these requirements:

SELECT * EXCEPT(churned), churned AS label: Excludes churned from features and renames it to label.

The OPTIONS(model_type='logistic_reg') specifies that a logistic regression model is being trained.

This setup ensures the model is correctly trained using the features in the dataset while targeting the churned column for predictions.

Using Analytics Hub to create a private exchange with data egress restrictions ensures controlled sharing of the dataset while minimizing the risk of unauthorized copying. This approach allows you to provide secure, managed access to the dataset without giving direct access to the raw data. The egress restriction ensures that data cannot be exported or copied outside the designated boundaries. Additionally, this solution provides a reusable framework that simplifies future data sharing with other teams or projects while maintaining strict data governance.

Extract from Google Documentation: From "Analytics Hub Overview" (https://cloud.google.com/analytics-hub/docs ):"Analytics Hub enables secure, controlled data sharing with private exchanges. Combine with organization policies like restrictDataEgress to prevent data copying, providing a reusable framework for sharing BigQuery datasets across teams."

UsingCloud Composerto design the processing pipeline as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is the most suitable approach because:

Fault tolerance: Cloud Composer (based on Apache Airflow) allows for handling failures at specific stages. You can clear the state of a failed task and rerun it without reprocessing the entire pipeline.

Stage-based processing: DAGs are ideal for workflows with interdependent stages where the output of one stage serves as input to the next.

Efficiency: This approach minimizes downtime and ensures that only failed stages are rerun, leading to faster final output generation.

Comprehensive and Detailed In-Depth Explanation:

Cost minimization requires matching storage classes to access patterns using lifecycle rules. Let’s assess:

Option A: Nearline during training (frequent access) incurs high retrieval costs and latency, unsuitable for ML workloads. Coldline after 30 days and Archive after 90 days are reasonable but misaligned initially.

Option B: Standard storage (no retrieval fees, low latency) is ideal for frequent access during training. Transitioning to Nearline (30-day minimum, low access) after 30 days and Coldline (90-day minimum, rare access) after 90 days matches the pattern and minimizes costs effectively.

Option C: Nearline during training is costly for frequent access, and Archive to Coldline is illogical (Archive is cheaper than Coldline).

Comprehensive and Detailed In-Depth Explanation:

The priorities are data integrity, recoverability after a regional disaster, low RPO (minimal data loss), and low latency for primary operations. Let’s analyze:

Option A: Multi-region backups store point-in-time snapshots in a separate region. With automated backups and transaction logs, RPO can be near-zero (e.g., minutes), and recovery is possible post-disaster. Primary operations remain in one zone, minimizing latency.

Option B: Regional HA (failover to another zone) with hourly cross-region backups protects against zone failures, but hourly backups yield an RPO of up to 1 hour—too high for valuable data. Manual backup management adds overhead.

Option C: Synchronous replication to another zone ensures zero RPO within a region but doesn’t protect against regional loss. Latency increases slightly due to sync writes across zones.

UsingDataflowto implement a streaming pipeline triggered by anOBJECT_FINALIZEnotification from Pub/Sub is the best solution. This approach automatically starts the data processing as soon as new files are uploaded to Cloud Storage, ensuring low latency. Dataflow can handle the data cleaning, deduplication, and enrichment with product information from the BigQuery table in a scalable and efficient manner. This solution minimizes overhead, as Dataflow is a fully managed service, and it is well-suited for real-time or near-real-time data pipelines.

UsingDataflowto create a streaming pipeline that includes validation and transformation steps is the most efficient and scalable approach for real-time analysis. Dataflow is optimized for high-volume data processing and allows you to apply validation and cleaning logic as the data flows through the pipeline. This ensures that only clean, validated data is loaded into BigQuery, supporting real-time analysis while handling high data volumes effectively.

Partitioning the BigQuery table by month allows efficient querying of recent data for the first 6 months, reducing query costs. After 6 months, exporting the data toColdline storageminimizes storage costs for data that is rarely accessed but needs to be retained for compliance. Implementing a lifecycle policy in Cloud Storage automates the deletion of the data after 3 years, ensuring compliance while reducing administrative overhead. This approach balances cost efficiency and compliance requirements effectively.

Creating external tables over the Parquet files in Cloud Storage allows you to perform SQL-based analysis and joins with data already in BigQuery without needing to load the files into BigQuery. This approach is efficient for a one-time analysis as it avoids the time and cost associated with loading large volumes of data into BigQuery. External tables provide seamless integration with Cloud Storage, enabling quick and cost-effective analysis of data stored in Parquet format.

UsingCloud Composerto create Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) is the best solution because it is a fully managed, scalable workflow orchestration service based on Apache Airflow. Cloud Composer allows you to define complex task dependencies and schedules while integrating seamlessly with Google Cloud services such as Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Dataproc for Apache Spark jobs. This approach minimizes operational overhead, supports scheduling and automation, and provides an efficient and fully managed way to orchestrate your data pipelines.

Extract from Google Documentation: From "Cloud Composer Overview" (https://cloud.google.com/composer/docs ):"Cloud Composer is a fully managed workflow orchestration service built on Apache Airflow, enabling you to schedule and automate complex data pipelines with dependencies across Google Cloud services like Cloud Storage, Dataproc, and BigQuery."

UsingDataflowto subscribe to the Pub/Sub topic and transform the activity logs is the best approach for this scenario. Dataflow is a managed service designed for processing and transforming streaming data in real time. It allows you to aggregate metrics from the raw activity logs efficiently and load the transformed data into a BigQuery table for reporting. This solution ensures scalability, supports real-time processing, and enables querying of both raw and aggregated data in BigQuery, providing the flexibility and insights needed for the dashboard.

Creating amaterialized viewwith the limited data in a new dataset and granting the data analyst theBigQuery Data Viewerrole on the dataset and theBigQuery Job Userrole in the project ensures that the analyst can query only the non-sensitive data without access to sensitive datasets. Materialized views allow you to predefine what subset of data is visible, providing a secure and efficient way to control access while maintaining compliance with data governance policies. This approach follows the principle of least privilege while meeting the requirements.

Since your existing data pipeline tools already support connectors to BigQuery, the most efficient approach is touse the existing data pipeline tool's BigQuery connectorto reconfigure the data mapping. This leverages your current tools, reducing migration complexity and setup time, while optimizing migration speed. By reconfiguring the data mapping within the existing pipeline, you can seamlessly direct the data into BigQuery without needing additional services or intermediary steps.

For regulatory requirements that mandate complete and manual control of data encryption, you should use customer-supplied encryption keys (CSEK). With CSEK, your company provides the encryption keys for data storage, and Google Cloud does not store or manage these keys. This approach ensures thatyour organization retains full control and responsibility over the encryption process, meeting strict regulatory compliance requirements.

UsingTransfer Appliancesis the best solution for securely and efficiently moving over 500 TB of data to Cloud Storage within a limited timeframe, especially with network bandwidth below 1 Gbps. Transfer Appliances are physical devices provided by Google Cloud to securely transfer large amounts of data. After copying the data to the appliances, they are shipped back to Google, where the data is uploaded to Cloud Storage. This approach bypasses bandwidth limitations and ensures the data is migrated quickly and securely.

The storage system must balance cost, simplicity, and access patterns: high initial access, decreasing over time, with some files remaining popular. Google Cloud Storage offers tailored options for this:

Option A: Custom Object Lifecycle Management (OLM) policies (e.g., transition to Nearline after 30 days, Archive after 90 days) are effective but static. They don’t adapt to actual usage, so popular old files in Archive would incur high retrieval costs.

Option B: Autoclass automatically adjusts storage classes (Standard, Nearline, Coldline, Archive) based on object access patterns, not just age. It keeps frequently accessed files in Standard (low latency/cost for access) and moves inactive ones to cheaper classes, minimizing costs while preserving simplicity. This fits the “some files remain popular” nuance.

Option C: A Cloud Scheduler job to manually change classes daily is complex (requires scripting, monitoring), error-prone, and less cost-effective than automated solutions like Autoclass or OLM.

Copying the storm event dataset into yourBigQuery projectand usingBigQuery Studioto query and visualize the data inLooker Studiois the best approach. This solution allows you to create reusable and automated workflows for generating risk reports. BigQuery handles the querying efficiently, and Looker Studio provides powerful tools for creating and sharing dynamic charts and dashboards. This setup ensures that reports can be easily re-run with updated data, minimizing manual effort and providing a scalable, interactive solution for visualizing risk reports.

Creatingmaterialized viewsis the best solution to improve dashboard loading time while ensuring that the data is as up-to-date as possible. Materialized views precompute and cache the results of complex joins and aggregations, significantly reducing query execution time for dashboards. They also automatically update as the underlying data changes, ensuring near real-time access to fresh data. This approach optimizes query performance and provides an efficient and scalable solution for streaming data dashboards.

For near real-time dashboards with slow queries involving joins and aggregations, Google recommends materialized views in BigQuery to precompute and refresh results automatically.

Option A: Scheduled queries compute intermediate results periodically, but they aren’t near real-time and require manual scheduling, adding latency.

Option B: Parameterized data types don’t address query performance for joins/aggregations; they’re for query flexibility, not optimization.

Option C: Disabling caching worsens performance by forcing full recomputation each time, contrary to the goal.

Using BigQuery ML is the best solution in this case because:

Ease of use: BigQuery ML allows users to build machine learning models using SQL, which requires minimal ML expertise.

Integrated platform: Since the data already exists in BigQuery, there’s no need to move it to another service, saving time and engineering resources.

Logistic regression: This is an appropriate model for binary classification tasks like predicting the likelihood of a customer making a purchase in the next month.

Comprehensive and Detailed In-Depth Explanation:

Predicting the likelihood of a click (binary outcome: click or no-click) requires a classification model. BigQuery ML supports this use case with logistic regression.

Option A: Linear regression predicts continuous values, not probabilities for binary outcomes.

Option B: Matrix factorization is for recommendation systems, not binary prediction.

Option C: Logistic regression predicts probabilities for binary classification (e.g., click likelihood), ideal for this scenario and supported in BigQuery ML.

To troubleshoot a failed Dataflow job as quickly as possible, you should navigate to theDataflow Jobs page in the Google Cloud console. The console provides access to detailed job logs and worker logs, which can help you identify the cause of the failure. The graphical interface also allows you to visualize pipeline stages, monitor performance metrics, and pinpoint where the error occurred, making it the most efficient way to diagnose and resolve the issue promptly.

Extract from Google Documentation: From "Monitoring Dataflow Jobs" (https://cloud.google.com/dataflow/docs/guides/monitoring-jobs ):"To troubleshoot a failed Dataflow job quickly, go to the Dataflow Jobs page in the Google Cloud Console, where you can view job logs and worker logs to identify errors and their root causes."