PDE cheat sheet

Exam at a glance

Domain weightings

How much of the exam each domain covers. Spend your study time in proportion — the heavier the domain, the more questions you'll see.

Key terms

BigQuery

BigQuery is Google Cloud's fully managed, serverless data warehouse for petabyte-scale analytics using SQL. PDE covers it as the central data warehouse for storing data and preparing it for analysis.

Dataflow

Dataflow is Google Cloud's fully managed service for running Apache Beam batch and streaming data-processing pipelines. PDE covers it as a primary tool for building pipelines in the ingesting-and-processing domain.

Pub/Sub

Pub/Sub is Google Cloud's globally scalable messaging service for ingesting event streams and decoupling producers from consumers. PDE covers it for planning and building streaming pipelines.

Dataproc

Dataproc is Google Cloud's managed service for running Apache Spark and Hadoop clusters, including ephemeral job-scoped clusters. PDE covers it as an option for building data-processing pipelines.

Cloud Storage

Cloud Storage is Google Cloud's object-storage service with tiered classes, often used as a data lake and staging area. PDE covers it when selecting storage systems and building a data lake.

Bigtable

Bigtable is Google Cloud's fully managed, wide-column NoSQL database for high-throughput, low-latency workloads at scale. PDE covers it when selecting storage systems for time-series or operational data.

Firestore

Firestore is Google Cloud's serverless, document NoSQL database with real-time synchronization. PDE covers it among the storage systems to select for semi-structured application data.

Cloud Composer

Cloud Composer is Google Cloud's managed Apache Airflow service for orchestrating and scheduling data workflows. PDE covers it for deploying, operationalizing, and automating pipelines.

Dataform

Dataform is a Google Cloud service for managing SQL-based data transformations and ELT workflows in BigQuery with version control. PDE covers it for building and operationalizing transformation pipelines.

BigQuery ML

BigQuery ML is a capability that lets you create and run machine learning models directly in BigQuery using SQL. PDE covers it when preparing and using data for AI and ML.

Vertex AI

Vertex AI is Google Cloud's unified platform for building, training, and deploying machine learning models. PDE covers it when preparing data for ML and integrating models with data pipelines.

Looker

Looker is Google Cloud's business-intelligence and data-visualization platform built on a modeling layer called LookML. PDE covers it when preparing data for visualization.

Analytics Hub

Analytics Hub is a Google Cloud service for securely sharing data and analytics assets across organizations using BigQuery. PDE covers it when sharing data in the preparing-for-analysis domain.

Data Catalog

Data Catalog, part of Dataplex, is a fully managed metadata-management service for discovering and governing data. PDE covers it for data governance when designing data processing systems.