Google Cloud SQL Cheat Sheet

Last updated on March 26, 2023

Google Cloud SQL Cheat Sheet

A fully managed relational database service. Cloud SQL is available for:
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- SQL Server

Features

Scale instantly with a single API call as your data grows.
Automated and on-demand backups are available.
You can restore your database instance to its state at an earlier point in time by enabling binary logging.
Data replication between multiple zones with automatic failover.
You can perform an analytics job by using BigQuery to directly query your CloudSQL instance.

Networking

Can be easily connected to App Engine, Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, and your workstation.

Security

Data is encrypted at rest and in transit and can be encrypted using customer-managed encryption keys.
It supports private connectivity with Virtual Private Cloud.
Every Cloud SQL instance includes a network firewall to allow you to publicly control network access to your database instances.

Pricing

Price varies depending on how much storage, memory, and CPU you provision.
Cloud SQL offers per-second billing and database instances.
Committed use discounts are offered for continuous use of database instances in a particular region for a one-year or three-year term.

Validate Your Knowledge

Question 1

You are working for a finance company and are assigned to configure a relational database solution on Google Cloud Platform to support a small set of operational data in a particular geographical location. Your company requires the database to be highly reliable and supports point-in-time recovery while minimizing operating costs.

What should you do?

Choose Cloud SQL (MySQL) and verify that the enable binary logging option is selected.
Choose Cloud SQL (MySQL) and select the create failover replicas option.
Choose Cloud Spanner and configure your instance with 2 nodes.
Choose Cloud Spanner and set up your instance as multi-regional.

Show me the answer!

Correct Answer: 1

Cloud SQL for MySQL is a fully-managed database service that helps you set up, maintain, manage, and administer your MySQL relational databases on Google Cloud Platform.

If you use Cloud SQL, the fully managed Google Cloud MySQL database, you should enable automated backups and binary logging for your Cloud SQL instances. This allows you to perform a point-in-time recovery, which restores your database from a backup and recovers it to a fresh Cloud SQL instance.

In Cloud SQL, point-in-time recovery (PITR) uses binary logs. These logs update regularly and use storage space. The binary logs are automatically deleted with their associated automatic backup, which generally happens after about 7 days. If the size of your binary logs is causing an issue for your instance, you can increase the instance storage size, but the binary log size increase in disk usage might be temporary. To avoid unexpected storage issues, it is recommended to enable automatic storage increases when using PITR.

Cloud Spanner is a fully managed, mission-critical, relational database service that offers transactional consistency at a global scale, schemas, SQL (ANSI 2011 with extensions), and automatic, synchronous replication for high availability.

Hence, the correct answer is: Choose Cloud SQL (MySQL) and verify that the enable binary logging option is selected.

The option that says: Choose Cloud SQL (MySQL) and select the create failover replicas is incorrect because this just helps in creating a standby instance that serves data when the primary instance fails. You have to enable the binary logging option to enable point-in-time recovery.

The option that says: Choose Cloud Spanner and configure your instance with 2 nodes is incorrect because this is expensive and does not support point-in-time recovery. Cloud Spanner is most suitable for serving data in multiple geographic locations.

The option that says: Choose Cloud Spanner and set up your instance as multi-regional is incorrect because this is not a cost-effective solution when compared to using Cloud SQL. Moreover, Cloud Spanner does not support point-in-time recovery.

References:
https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/
https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql/backup-recovery/pitr

Note: This question was extracted from our Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Exams.

For more Google Cloud practice exam questions with detailed explanations, check out the Tutorials Dojo Portal: