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GooglePDE
PDE Practice Exam — Professional Data Engineer
Professional Data Engineer covers the whole life of data on Google Cloud: designing processing systems, building batch and streaming pipelines, choosing where data is stored, preparing it for analysis and ML, and keeping workloads reliable and cost-efficient. Practise across all five official sections with full 40-question papers and a score breakdown per section.
PDE exam at a glance
- Questions per paper
- 40
- Time limit
- 120 minutes
- Passing score
- Not published by Google
- Question format
- Multiple choice and multiple select
- Official exam fee
- USD $200
- Certification valid for
- 2 years
- ReadyForCert access
- 60 days · $8.99 AUD
- Free sample
- 20 questions
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What the PDE exam covers
Designing data processing systems
Security and compliance, reliability and data fidelity, portability, and planning data migrations.
22%Ingesting and processing the data
Planning, building and running batch and streaming pipelines with Dataflow, Pub/Sub, Dataproc and related services.
25%Storing the data
Choosing storage systems, planning a BigQuery data warehouse, using a data lake, and designing a data platform.
20%Preparing and using data for analysis
Preparing data for visualisation and for AI and ML, and sharing data securely.
15%Maintaining and automating data workloads
Optimising resources, automating and scheduling workloads, monitoring and troubleshooting, and handling failures.
18%
A sample PDE question
One question written for this page, in the same style as the questions in the bank.
Ingesting and processing the data
Click events reach a Pub/Sub topic, and some arrive several minutes late. A Dataflow pipeline must produce per-minute counts based on when each click happened, and late events must still be counted. What should you do?
- AUse one-minute fixed windows on event time, with a watermark and allowed lateness. — Correct answer
- BUse processing-time windows so each event is counted in the minute it arrives.
- CWrite every event to BigQuery and compute the counts in a nightly query.
- DAdd Dataflow workers until no event arrives late.
About the PDE exam
How many questions are on the Professional Data Engineer exam?
40–50 multiple choice and multiple select questions in two hours. ReadyForCert papers use 40 questions in 120 minutes.
What score do I need to pass the PDE exam?
Google does not publish a passing score or your numeric result — you receive a pass or fail. Because there is no published bar, aim comfortably above a bare pass: ReadyForCert scores you against a 72% threshold so you have a concrete target.
How much does the exam cost and how long is it valid?
Registration is USD $200 plus tax where applicable, and the certification is valid for 2 years.
Are these the real Google PDE exam questions?
No. These are practice questions written against the current official exam guide. Google's exam content is confidential and the bank is rotated, so practising against leaked questions does not survive an exam refresh.
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