Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional: Complete Study Guide

The advanced Databricks data engineering cert. Exam format, the core topics (advanced Delta, streaming, modeling, governance), and a study plan beyond the Associate.

Practice 164 free Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional questions

Official exam page: https://www.databricks.com/learn/certification/data-engineer-professional

The Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional is the advanced data-engineering certification. It goes well beyond the Associate, testing your ability to build robust, production-grade pipelines with advanced Delta Lake, Structured Streaming, data modeling, security and deployment on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform.

Exam at a glance

• Format: 60 multiple-choice questions
• Duration: 120 minutes
• Cost: 200 USD
• Delivery: online proctored
• Recommended: the Associate-level knowledge plus hands-on production experience

Confirm the current version and objectives on the official page linked above.

Topic areas

• Databricks tooling. Clusters, Jobs, Repos, the CLI/REST API, and platform internals.
• Data processing (batch & incremental). Advanced Spark, Structured Streaming, Auto Loader, stateful streaming, and the medallion architecture at scale.
• Data modeling. Slowly changing dimensions (SCD), Change Data Capture (CDC), and designing for incremental loads with Delta.
• Security and governance. Unity Catalog, dynamic views, fine-grained access control, PII handling.
• Monitoring, logging, testing and deployment. Pipeline observability, data quality, and CI/CD for Databricks.

Concepts to master

• Advanced Delta Lake: MERGE for upserts and CDC, change data feed, OPTIMIZE/ZORDER, partitioning strategy, transaction log internals
• Structured Streaming: triggers, watermarks, stateful aggregations, stream-stream joins, exactly-once with checkpoints
• Modeling: SCD Type 1 vs Type 2, deduplication, idempotent pipelines
• Unity Catalog: dynamic views, row/column-level security, lineage
• Deployment: Databricks Asset Bundles / CI-CD, testing strategies

A study plan

• Week 1: Advanced Delta Lake and the transaction log.
• Week 2: Structured Streaming in depth — watermarks, state, joins.
• Week 3: Data modeling (SCD/CDC) and idempotent design.
• Week 4: Unity Catalog governance, testing, deployment, then practice exams.

Exam-day tips

• Expect code-reading questions — be comfortable interpreting PySpark and Spark SQL.
• Know streaming semantics precisely (watermarks, output modes, state stores).
• Be ready for SCD/CDC implementation details with Delta MERGE.

Practice now

Use the free Data Engineer Professional questions below, weighting your time toward advanced Delta and streaming.