Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional practice examsIn development
Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional
The senior tier, and genuinely hard rather than nominally so: the Delta transaction log and why updates rewrite files, the small file problem and what compaction and clustering actually fix, incremental processing with Auto Loader, merge and change data feed, streaming checkpoints and watermarks, then Unity Catalog governance, task graphs and declarative pipelines with expectations, asset bundles for reproducible deployment, and reading task duration distribution to tell skew from an undersized cluster.
What you get
Papers are cut from the bank and weighted like the real exam, and no question appears in two of them. Every wrong answer comes back on later days until you have it right.
What the exam covers
| Delta Lake internals and pipeline design | Not published |
| Governance, orchestration, deployment and performance | Not published |
Two sample questions
1. Which job setting resolves a transient failure without human intervention?
- A retry policy — correct
- A larger cluster
- A longer timeout
- Disabling alerts
Why: A retry policy reruns the task, which resolves transient infrastructure or network failures.
2. What characterises the gold layer?
- Curated, aggregated data for consumption — correct
- Unvalidated raw events straight from the source
- The transaction logs of every other table
- Temporary checkpoint files
Why: Gold holds refined, business-level aggregates ready for reporting and analytics.
The real Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional exam
| Length | 120 minutes |
|---|---|
| Questions | 60 |
| Pass mark | Scaled score; Databricks does not publish the percentage |
| Price | Purchased per attempt through the Databricks certification portal |
| Recommended before you sit it | None enforced. The associate certification and at least a year of production Databricks work are assumed. |
| Valid for | 2 years |
Exam facts as published by Databricks; always check the vendor’s page before you book.
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