What happens when a sudden traffic spike overwhelms your database and slows application response times to a crawl? This course teaches you to scale managed database systems efficiently and offload heavy query traffic on Google Cloud. You will evaluate storage autoscaling and compute scaling strategies to handle volatile workloads without overprovisioning costs. Through realistic scenarios, you will configure cross-region read replicas to distribute analytical load, apply caching layers to accelerate hot key lookups, and deploy connection pooling to protect primary database instances from exhaustion. You will examine these high-performance techniques across Cloud SQL, AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, Spanner, Bigtable, Firestore, and Memorystore for Valkey.