Databricks Data Engineer Associate Certification Preparation Strategy.

The article is going to cover my preparation strategy and the resources which I followed to get certified in the "Databricks Data Engineer Associate Certification Exam"

I took about three months to prepare for the exam (after I cleared the Databricks Certified Developer for Apache Spark 3.0 exam).

Let me give you a brief context of the topics that you need to prepare for the exam

1. Databricks Lakehouse Platform (Part 1) :- (Magic Commands, Git versioning with Databricks Repos, Different types of cluster, various markdown commands to format notebook)
2. Databricks Lakehouse Platform (Part 2) :- (Delta Table creation using CTAS, advanced delta lake features such as TIME TRAVEL and VACCUM, creating custom databases, temoprary/global views)
3. ETL with Spark SQL and Python :- (Reading raw files directly into databricks by directly querying the files using SQL, INSERT / INSERT OVERWRITE statements to append data into existing tables, UPSERT statements)
4. Streaming Data Processing :- (Reading streams of data from external source, incrementally processing data using AUTO LOADER feature, understanding Medallion / Multi Hop architecture, Delta Live tables, processing CDC using DLT)
5. Databricks Jobs :- (Understanding Databricks cluster configurations, choosing right cluster in production jobs, creating email alerts for job failures, scheduling and refreshing jobs)
6. Data Governance :- (Understanding concepts of Unity Catalog, three level namespace, granting objects privileges in Databricks)

This was an high level overview of the topics which you would see in the exam.

You need to have extensive hands on to be able to clear the exam. Its an associate level exam which contains a wide range of topics. Also please go through the sample exam paper which is there in the above link.

I took around three months to prepare for this certification (after I was done with Databricks Developer Certification for Apache Spark 3.0). Its not a pre-requisite for the exam, but having a basic knowledge of PySpark APIs will be helpful. Putting an effort of 1 hour daily for 3-4 months should suffice in terms of preparation,

You may use the community edition of Databricks and import the notebooks attached in these courses to practice. Things might looks very new in certain topics (same was with me initially:) ), but by putting consistent amount of efforts everyday, you would definitely clear the exam with ease.

Good luck with your exam, you may reach out to me in case you have further queries or clarifications.