Easy — PDE Practice Quiz

Question 1

A data engineering team runs a nightly transformation that reads from three staging tables and writes into a reporting table used by BI dashboards each morning. They currently trigger the SQL manually. They want a fully managed, low-maintenance way to run this single BigQuery SQL statement on a recurring schedule with built-in run history, retries, and no external infrastructure to manage. Which approach best meets these requirements with the least operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

Configure a BigQuery scheduled query that runs the transformation SQL on a nightly cron schedule.

Answer

Deploy a Cloud Composer environment and author an Airflow DAG with a BigQueryInsertJobOperator to run the SQL nightly.

Answer

Create a Cloud Scheduler job that publishes to Pub/Sub, triggering a Cloud Function that calls the BigQuery API.

Answer

Write a Python script on a Compute Engine VM invoked by a system cron entry to execute the query each night.

Question 2

Your team runs a nightly transformation in BigQuery that consists of a single SQL statement writing to a reporting table. It has no upstream or downstream dependencies on other systems, requires no conditional branching, and only needs to run once per day at 02:00. Currently it is a manual query someone triggers each morning. Operations wants the lowest-maintenance way to automate this while keeping failure notifications visible. Which approach best fits these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Create a BigQuery scheduled query with a daily schedule at 02:00 and configure a Pub/Sub notification (or email) on run completion/failure.

Answer

Deploy a Cloud Composer environment and build a DAG with a single BigQueryInsertJobOperator scheduled daily.

Answer

Create a Cloud Function triggered by Cloud Scheduler that submits the query through the BigQuery client library.

Answer

Write a Dataflow batch pipeline that executes the SQL and schedule it with a Flex Template trigger.