Professional Cloud Database Engineer Certification Workshop - Formal Session 5 - August 13 2024

SLIDES
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Several corrections were made to the slides after the presentation recorded in this video.
In particular, the slide shown in the youtube Thumbnail was corrected.
Please refer to the slide deck and speaker notes as you view the video.
This is a recording of the Formal Session #5 meeting in the series Road To Google Developer Certification workshop - Professional Cloud Database Engineer. The session leaders are Norbert Kremer, Ph.D. of GDG Cloud Boston and Jessica Rudd, Ph.D. of GDG Atlanta.
In this session, we reviewed the Skills Boost courses on Spanner, Bigtable and AlloyDB.
Before going into those topics, we had a thorough discussion of the architectures used by these 3 systems. We went into the crucial differences in the physical storage layouts used by row-oriented and column-oriented databases. We explained why both of these are relational databases. Furthermore, we differentiated between column-oriented, or column-store databases and column-family databases and showed an example of the physical data layout in a column-family database, Apache HBase. Understanding of these key concepts is essential in Cloud Solution Architecture. The database storage architectures drive performance and cost characteristics of the deployed solution. Despite this importance, many trade press publications contain very erroneous understandings of the basic principles. Fortunately, the correct information is readily available from the system designers themselves. Original open-source publications of Michael Stonebraker, Daniel Abadi, Andrew Pavlo and Chang et al at Google (the Bigtable paper) are cited in the slides. The "NoSQL Distilled" book, by Pramod Sadalage and Martin Fowler, and "Making Databases Work" edited by Michael Brodie are also cited in the slides. The key concepts in the original research papers should be comprehensible by anyone who is participating in these workshops.
As we pivoted to discuss NoSQL databases, we had a look at the "History of Databases in No-tation", a humorous review of how the meaning of "NoSQL" has evolved over the years. This image was provided by Mark Madsen. Mark and I both teach at the TDWI Transform conferences.
With the fundamental concepts thoroughly discussed, we reviewed the Skills Boost labs for Google Cloud Spanner, for Google Bigtable and AlloyDB. AlloyDB may also be described as Hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP) system, although it is not one, like SAP HANA, where all or most of the data fits into system memory. cloud.google.c...
See the notes on the slides for more details.
With a thorough understanding of how the systems are built and with plenty of hands-on labs from Skills Boost, the Google Professional Cloud Database Engineer certification exam should be easy, right?
MUSIC CREDIT: The music at the beginning and end of the video is from the song Happytime by Podington Bear. You may listen to this and their other songs at the Free Music Archive. freemusicarchi... The music is used here under Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (CC BY-NC 3.0). View the license deed at creativecommon...