Question

A retail analytics company runs a reporting application backed by a single Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance in us-central1. The primary instance handles all transactional writes, but a growing team of analysts in Europe runs heavy read-only dashboards that are now causing CPU contention and slow queries on the primary. Leadership wants to reduce read load on the primary and improve dashboard response times for the European users, while keeping operational overhead low and avoiding application rewrites. What should the architect do?

Accepted Answer

Create a cross-region read replica in europe-west1 and direct the analysts' read-only dashboard queries to the replica's connection endpoint.

Answer

Enable high availability (regional) on the primary instance so the standby in another zone can serve the analysts' read queries.

Answer

Migrate the database to a single larger machine type with more vCPUs and memory to absorb the additional read traffic.

Answer

Export the database nightly to Cloud Storage and have the European analysts query the exported files with BigQuery external tables.