Data Engineer Associate Certification (July 25, 2025 version)

🧰 1. Data Engineer Associate Certification (July 25, 2025 version)

Exam domains & weights are based on the updated guide published for exams taken on or after July 25, 2025 ().

Understand Databricks architecture (control plane vs data plane)
Workspace components: notebooks, clusters, Repos, magic commands
Git integration via Repos & version control
Compute types: serverless vs interactive clusters, selection strategies
Platform UI: query optimizers, performance/compute selection advantages
Hands-on: Create and manage Repos, launch clusters (including serverless), explore the UI features.

Data ingestion using Spark SQL and PySpark
COPY INTO, Auto Loader, schema inference, handling complex types: JSON, structs, arrays
SQL DML (INSERT, MERGE, UPSERT, INSERT OVERWRITE), view creation
User-defined functions (UDFs) in SQL and PySpark
Databricks Connect to develop locally while executing on remote clusters (, , )
Hands-on: Load JSON/XML and CSV into Delta using COPY INTO and Auto Loader; write UDFs; run local code via Databricks Connect.

Multi-hop ETL architecture: Bronze → Silver → Gold layers
Delta Lake internals: ACID transactions, schema evolution, time travel, versioning
Table maintenance: VACUUM, OPTIMIZE, ZORDER, Cloning
Change data capture (CDC) and COPY INTO
Declarative pipeline building via Delta Live Tables (DLT): LIVE vs STREAM, error handling
Managed vs external tables; DDL & DML operations in Delta
Hands-on: Build a full DLT pipeline; practice MERGE, OPTIMIZE, time travel; partition and Z‑order tables.

Databricks Workflows & Jobs: multi-task DAGs, task dependencies, parameterization
Scheduling with CRON, retries, alerts and notifications
CI/CD integration via Repos, Asset Bundles (DAB) deployment workflows (, , )
Hands-on: Orchestrate a multi-step job, configure retries and alerts, deploy a pipeline via Asset Bundles.

Unity Catalog components: catalogs, schemas, tables, privileges
Role-based access control: grants, service principals, SCIM
Secure clusters, object controls, metadata management
Data quality concepts: expectations, constraints, validation rules
Delta Sharing for external data collaboration across organizations (, )
Hands-on: Set up Unity Catalog hierarchy, assign permissions, enable Delta Sharing, create data quality constraints.