Pass the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Database Engineer Exam (2023)

3 min readOct 24, 2022

Hey everyone, I hope you all are doing well. Recently, I passed the very famous Google Cloud Professional Cloud Database Engineer certification exam. In this article, I will share the strategy and resources that helped me achieve this.

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About the exam

The Professional Cloud Database Engineer exam assesses your ability to:

Design scalable and highly available cloud database solutions
Manage a solution that can span multiple database solutions
Migrate data solutions
Deploy scalable and highly available databases in Google Cloud

The price of the exam is $200 and the duration is 2 hours. You can expect 50 questions to be answered within the given time.

My Background

I have been tinkering around Google Cloud services for the past 2 years and am working as a Cloud Infrastructure and DevOps Engineer. This ensured that my work experience also contributed to the knowledge base I possess which helped me with understanding Google Cloud at a detailed level. Since I hadn’t been working on data services, I had to make an extra effort to learn about data engineering and databases, although I had been having some knowledge of databases since college.

Preparation Strategy

I had been preparing for all the data-related exams together for around 2 months. So I made a parallel approach to learning for the certifications.

Visit the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Database Engineer page on Google. This will give you an overview of the exam and what is required to complete the certification.
Understand what the exam is all about. Visit the exam guide to see the contents in detail. You will get a solid understanding of the content you will need to prepare for the exam.
Visit the official Google Cloud Platform documentation to clearly understand each of the GCP services. These would make your GCP knowledge but you still have another essential factor to cover: “Hands-on experience”.

“No technical certification in the world will be useful for you if you don’t know how to implement it in the real world scenario.”

Exam Experience

I didn’t prepare too much for this exam as I thought it would be an easy one since it focused on databases. The knowledge I gained over the years at college and school on databases helped me recollect my foundations. On top of this, the knowledge I acquired while learning Google Cloud also made it strong.

However, there was a bigger challenge.

No practice questions or courses to prepare while I wrote the exam.

There was no other way than to rely on documentation. Thankfully, the exam was also smooth. I faced questions mostly about Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, and its functions. For example, how do you ensure private connectivity, how is failover implemented, how should you plan for disaster recovery, how is backup implemented, etc? The next set of questions was from a migration perspective and Database Migration Service (DMS). Most of the questions were pretty much straightforward. I felt the exam to be like an Associate level for GCP databases. I had a feeling that I would pass the exam without dropping much sweat and in the end, it turned out to be true.