Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate

Review the official skills for Databricks Intelligence Platform and practice applying them to scenarios.

Understand the core components of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, such as its architecture, Delta Lake, and Unity Catalog:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Understand Databricks Data Intelligence Platform’s compute services, including their characteristics, limitations, and cost models, and select the most suitable option for each workload use case:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Review the official skills for Data Ingestion and Loading and practice applying them to scenarios.

Enable and detail data ingestion patterns, including batch, streaming, and incremental loading, and import data from sources such as local files, Lakeflow Connect standard connectors, and Lakeflow Connect managed connectors:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Use the COPY INTO command to incrementally load files from cloud object storage (ADLS/S3/GCS) into Unity ‑ Catalog–governed tables:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Use Auto Loader with schema enforcement and schema evolution in batch modes (for example, directory listing or file notification) to land data into Unity ‑ Catalog–governed tables:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Configure Lakeflow Connect to reliably ingest data from diverse enterprise sources into Unity ‑ Catalog–governed tables:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Use JDBC/ODBC or REST clients in notebooks to land data into cloud storage or directly into Unity ‑ Catalog–governed tables, usually orchestrated and scheduled with Lakeflow Jobs:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Prioritize between Auto Loader, Lakeflow Connect (standard and managed connectors), partner connectors, and other ingestion methods based on technical requirements such as data volume, ingestion frequency, data types, and governance needs with Unity Catalog:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Ingest semi-structured and unstructured data (for example, JSON and nested data) via Lakeflow Connect and other managed connectors into Unity ‑ Catalog–governed Delta tables:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Review the official skills for Data Transformation and Modeling and practice applying them to scenarios.

Implement data cleaning by reading bronze tables with PySpark/SQL, cleaning nulls, standardizing data types, and writing to new silver tables:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Combine DataFrames with operations such as Inner join, left join, broadcast join, multiple keys, cross join, union, and union all:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Manipulate columns, rows, and table structures by adding, dropping, splitting, renaming column names, applying filters, and exploding arrays:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Perform data deduplication operations and aggregate operations on DataFrames, such as count, approximate count distinct, and mean, summary:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Understand the basic tuning parameters (spark.sql.shuffle.partitions:, spark.default.parallelism, spark.executor/driver.memory, spark.sql.autoBroadcastJoinThreshold) and re-measure the performance:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Understand the difference between, and how to build, Gold layer objects such as materialized views, views, streaming tables, and tables for BI and analytics teams in Unity Catalog:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Apply data quality checks and validation rules to ensure reliable Silver and Gold datasets:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Working with Lakeflow:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Review the official skills for Jobs and practice applying them to scenarios.

Implement control flows (retries and conditional tasks such as branching and looping) using Lakeflow:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Review the official skills for Jobs for pipeline orchestration and practice applying them to scenarios.

Configure common tasks (notebook, SQL query, dashboard, and pipeline tasks) and their dependencies using Lakeflow Jobs and its DAG ‑ based task graph:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Implement job schedules using Lakeflow Jobs with an understanding of trigger types (scheduled, file arrival, and table update):

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Choose between time ‑ based and data ‑ driven triggers based on data availability and pipeline dependencies:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Review the official skills for Implementing CI/CD and practice applying them to scenarios.

Manage your code development workflow within the Databricks workspace UI, including creating and switching between branches in Databricks Repos, committing and pushing changes, and creating pull requests using Databricks Git integration:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Understand environment-specific configuration using Automation Bundle (formerly Databricks Asset Bundles) variables and overrides while promoting the same codebase across dev, test, and prod targets:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Deploy Declarative Automation Bundles (formerly Databricks Asset Bundles) to package, configure, and promote Lakeflow Jobs, Lakeflow Spark Declarative Pipelines, and other workspace assets across dev, test, and prod environments:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Understand the Databricks CLI to validate, deploy, and manage Declarative Automation Bundles (formerly Databricks Asset Bundles) and other workspace assets in automated CI/CD workflows:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Review the official skills for Troubleshooting, Monitoring, and Optimization and practice applying them to scenarios.

Identify trends in job performance using the Lakeflow Jobs run history view to compare current execution times against historical baselines:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Use the Lakeflow Jobs UI to monitor pipeline health by interpreting job statuses, viewing DAG ‑ based task graphs to spot upstream blockers, and tracking pipeline run times and failure rates:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Identify common performance bottlenecks such as data skew, shuffling, and disk spilling by interpreting stage-level metrics in the Spark UI:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Understand the features of Liquid Clustering and predictive optimization:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Diagnose cluster startup failures, library conflicts, and out-of-memory issues:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Review the official skills for Governance and Security and practice applying them to scenarios.

Differentiate between managed and external tables in Unity Catalog and perform basic operations (create, modify, delete, and convert between managed and external tables) on them:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Configure access controls using the UI and SQL by applying GRANT, REVOKE, and DENY privileges to principals (users, groups, and service principals) at appropriate levels of the security hierarchy:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Understand column-level masking and row-level security to restrict data visibility based on user groups:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf

Understand Unity Catalog ABAC policies to centrally control row-level filtering and column masking for sensitive data:

https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2026-03/databricks-certified-data-engineer-associate-exam-guide-may-4-2026.pdf