Technical Articles
Get Certified: Google Cloud – Professional Cloud Database Engineer
In this blog post series, you will find some suggestions about how to get certified on the Google Cloud Platform.
There is no SAP on Google Cloud certification (yet), but we do have some excellent material to get started. Interested to learn more? You are invited to join the LinkedIn Special Interest Group (SIG) Questions? Please post as comment. Useful? Give us a like and share on social media. Thanks! |
Google Cloud Certification Program
The Cloud Database Engineer is one of the professional-level exams with 5+ years of overall database and IT experience, including 2 years of hands-on experience working with Google Cloud database solutions.
- For the program, see cloud.google.com/certification
For the argument why you might want to take up a certification (should you need any convincing, or want to get some funding from your manager), see
To promote its platform, Google has a number of programs to make it easier to get certified, see
Professional Cloud Database Engineer
On the exam page, you find all the information you need about the exam, how to prepare, how to register, etc.
The certification was released in July 2022.
Exam Guide
The exam guide lists the topics you need to know. This is an extensive and comprehensive list which should be taken literally: you can expect questions about each of the points mentioned.
- 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
Covering most of the database services offered by Google Cloud.
For the illustration, see
Sample Questions
Online Courses
| The online courses mentioned below are a great way to get introduced and familiarise yourself with the content of the exam. However, just watching the videos will NOT suffice to pass the exam. |
Cloud Skill Boost (Qwiklabs)
To prepare for the exam, Google proposes a learning path (two courses, four Qwiklabs quests), which are free to join.
The labs require credits but can these can be obtained for when signing up for one several promotions.
In a Qwiklab quest you first learn how to perform specific activities. The last lab is a challenge where you need to apply those skills. Excellent training material.
Coursera
The same material (2 courses, four quests, excluding the challenges) are also available online/on-demand from Coursera, You can audit the course but for the questions, labs and official certificate of completion of the specialization you need to sign up.
According to Coursera’s estimate it takes 32 weeks to complete. Although you can certainly go through the material a bit faster, you will need to carve out some time for this.
Pluralsight
The two courses (but not the quests) are also available on Pluralsight. You can get a free 10-day trial when you sign up in case your company does not have a corporate subscription (SAP).
Study Guides
Documentation
In addition to the courses and labs, you will need to familiarise yourself with the documentation of the Google Cloud products covered in the exam (Cloud SQL, Spanner, Bigtable,
- Cloud SQL | MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server
- Cloud Spanner
- Cloud Bigtable
- Datastore
- Database Migration Service
- Bare Metal Solution | Oracle
As you can spent days just reading the docs, the challenge is to map the topic areas of the The exam guide (see above) to the documentation.
For some Google Cloud certifications, you can find sample material online. This is not official material; always double check with the online edition of the exam guide.
Certified Directory
Once you get your certification(s), you can choose to be listed in the Google Cloud Credential Holder Directory.
There are currently (Sep 2022) a little over 28K members listed of which 115 are certified as Professional Cloud Database Engineer.
Wait, There is More
For events, webinars, learning groups, and more, visit
For all GCP products, see
There are many articles posted about the certification, a good place to start is
Share and Connect
Questions? Please post as comment.
Useful? Give us a like and share on social media.
Thanks!
If you would like to receive updates, connect with me on
- LinkedIn > linkedin.com/in/dvankempen
- Twitter > @dvankempen
For the author page of SAP PRESS, visit
| Over the years, for the SAP HANA Academy, SAP’s Partner Innovation Lab, and à titre personnel, I have written a little over 300 posts here for the SAP Community. Some articles only reached a few readers. Others attracted quite a few more.For your reading pleasure and convenience, here is a curated list of posts which somehow managed to pass the 10k-view mile stone and, as sign of current interest, still tickle the counters each month. |