Exam Map: Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Unofficial course. Not affiliated with, sponsored or endorsed by Databricks, Inc.

You don't need another 20 hours of video. You need to know exactly what the current (May 4, 2026) Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate exam covers, see how each skill works, and test yourself.

The exam and the data engineering skills are the same whether you work in Azure Databricks or on AWS or Google Cloud, so this course fits every data engineer preparing for the certification, from PySpark and Delta Lake to Unity Catalog.

This course is a high-yield exam map. In about 40 minutes, every one of the objectives in the official exam guide is covered, in proportion to its exam weight:

• Ingestion with COPY INTO and Auto Loader, including schema evolution and rescued data
• PySpark cleaning, joins, explode, dedup and aggregates
• Gold objects: views, materialized views, streaming tables, and data quality expectations
• Lakeflow Jobs: task types, retries, if/else, for each, and triggers
• Git folders, Declarative Automation Bundles and the CLI
• Troubleshooting with run history and Spark UI metrics, Liquid Clustering
• Unity Catalog: managed vs external tables, grants, row filters, column masks and ABAC

Every demo comes with ready-to-run notebooks and a small sample dataset for Databricks Free Edition, which costs nothing. The few topics Free Edition can't run, such as the Spark UI and external tables, are clearly marked and explained with diagrams.

Then you practise with 51 original scenario questions in 4 section quizzes. Every answer is explained and linked to the official Databricks documentation. The questions are written only from the public exam guide and docs. They are not real exam questions, which would break Databricks' certification terms.

The new names are used throughout: Lakeflow Jobs, Lakeflow Spark Declarative Pipelines, Declarative Automation Bundles and Git folders, with the old names mentioned once so nothing on the exam surprises you.

What this course is: a structured map of every objective, the key skills with runnable code, and practice questions that show where you're weak. What it isn't: a replacement for hands-on experience, or a beginner's course in SQL and Python. It can't guarantee a pass; it helps you focus your final review.

Taught by Eason, a Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional.