Associate Data Practitioner
Free Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner Practice Test
12 exam-style questions with full explanations — no sign-up. Score yourself, then close your gaps with the full course.
Exam fee ~$1254 exam domainsLevel Associate2 timed practice tests in the course
✅ Free practice — no sign-up📝 Real exam-style questions💡 Detailed explanations💸 30-day money-back via Udemy
A company wants to ingest clickstream events from its mobile app in real time, with sub-second latency, so that a Dataflow pipeline can process and write aggregated metrics to BigQuery continuously. Which service should receive the events from the mobile app before Dataflow processes them?
Pub/Sub is the managed messaging service designed for real-time, high-throughput event ingestion and decouples producers (the app) from consumers (Dataflow), which is the standard streaming ingestion pattern on Google Cloud.
A retail analytics team needs to calculate a running total of daily sales for each store in BigQuery, where the running total resets independently per store and accumulates in date order. Which SQL approach BEST achieves this?
A window function with PARTITION BY store_id resets the calculation per store, and ORDER BY sale_date (with the default frame) produces a cumulative running total in date order — this is the standard, efficient BigQuery pattern for running totals.
A data engineering team needs to orchestrate a pipeline with 15 interdependent tasks spanning BigQuery, Dataflow, and Cloud Storage, requiring conditional branching and task-level retry logic. Which service should they use?
Cloud Composer (managed Apache Airflow) supports complex DAGs with branching operators, task dependencies, and configurable retries across multiple GCP services.
A media company stores 80 TB of video analytics logs in a single Cloud Storage bucket. Logs are accessed daily for the first 30 days, occasionally for the next 60 days, and almost never after 90 days, though they must be retained for 7 years for compliance. Which configuration BEST minimizes storage cost while meeting these requirements?
A staged lifecycle rule (Standard → Nearline at 30 days → Coldline at 90 days → Archive at 365 days) matches the access pattern precisely, minimizing cost at each stage, while a retention/compliance hold prevents early deletion before the 7-year requirement is met.
A retailer runs a MySQL database on-premises and needs ongoing, low-latency replication of row-level inserts, updates, and deletes into BigQuery for near-real-time reporting, without writing custom extraction code. Which service BEST meets this requirement?
Datastream is purpose-built for change data capture (CDC) from databases like MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL, continuously streaming row-level changes into BigQuery or Cloud Storage with minimal setup.
A marketing team wants to let any employee build ad-hoc dashboards using a drag-and-drop interface, without writing SQL or LookML, and without incurring additional licensing cost. Which Google Cloud tool should they use?
Looker Studio is Google's free, self-service BI tool with a drag-and-drop report/dashboard builder designed for business users who don't write SQL, making it the right fit for broad, low-cost ad-hoc dashboarding.
A company wants to transform data already loaded into BigQuery using SQL, with automatic dependency resolution between transformation steps and git-based version control integration. Which tool is the BEST fit?
Dataform is purpose-built for SQL-based ELT in BigQuery, automatically building a dependency graph from ref() calls and integrating natively with Git repositories.
A data analyst needs read-only query access to one BigQuery dataset named `sales_prod` but must not be able to view or query any other dataset in the project. What is the correct way to grant this access?
IAM roles in BigQuery can be bound at the dataset resource level, not just the project level. Granting BigQuery Data Viewer directly on the sales_prod dataset (plus the project-level BigQuery Job User role to run queries) restricts visibility to only that dataset, following least-privilege principles the exam emphasizes.
A marketing team wants scheduled, automated imports of Google Ads campaign performance data directly into BigQuery every day without writing custom pipeline code. Which service should they configure?
BigQuery Data Transfer Service includes built-in connectors for Google Ads and other Google SaaS sources, allowing scheduled, code-free data loads directly into BigQuery tables.
A data analyst wants to use BigQuery ML to predict whether a customer will churn (yes/no) using existing customer behavior tables already stored in BigQuery, without exporting data to an external ML platform. Which model type is MOST appropriate?
LOGISTIC_REG is BigQuery ML's model type designed for binary (and multi-class) classification problems like churn prediction (yes/no outcome), and it trains directly on BigQuery tables with simple SQL syntax.
In a Cloud Composer DAG, which Airflow task parameter controls how many times a failed task is automatically retried before it is marked as failed?
The 'retries' parameter in default_args or on a task directly sets the number of retry attempts allowed after a failure.
A company has data scattered across several Cloud Storage buckets and BigQuery datasets owned by different teams. Data stewards need a single place to discover datasets, view business metadata, and apply consistent governance policies across both storage systems. Which Google Cloud service should they use?
Dataplex provides unified data management by letting organizations logically organize Cloud Storage and BigQuery assets into lakes and zones, enabling centralized discovery, metadata management, and governance policy enforcement across both storage systems from a single control plane.
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The full course has two full-length practice tests, video lessons for every exam domain, hands-on labs and detailed answer explanations.
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How much does the Associate Data Practitioner exam cost?
The exam fee is approximately $125 and varies by region — confirm current pricing with the certification vendor before you book.
What topics are on the exam?
It covers 4 domains: Prepare and ingest data (~30%), Analyze and present data (~26%), Orchestrate data pipelines (~20%), Manage data (~24%). The full course has a dedicated chapter, lab and practice-test coverage for each.
Is this practice test really free?
Yes — all questions on this page are free with explanations and no sign-up. The paid Udemy course adds two full-length timed exams, video lessons and hands-on labs.
Will this prepare me for the real exam?
The questions mirror the real exam's style and are mapped to the official domains. This is exam-focused preparation — combine the free test with the full course's timed simulations to gauge your readiness.