Databricks Data Engineer Associate Exam Guide (2026): Pass on Your First Try
Video
What is the primary difference between the Databricks Control Plane and Data Plane?
Databricks Lakehouse Platform
Question · Easy
Wedding seating, as a LEFT JOIN
Short
Complete 2026 study guide for the Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate exam. Current 7-section outline (May 4, 2026 version), Lakeflow Jobs, Unity Catalog, ABAC, CI/CD with Asset Bundles, a free 6-week plan, and 100% free practice questions.
Blog
Lakehouse architecture
Lakehouse Architecture
Flashcard
What is a Delta Lake?
Default table format on Databricks, built by extending Parquet files with a transaction log for ACID guarantees and scalable metadata handling.
Platform components
Guess the Term
Introduction
About the Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate Exam
Study guide
Cheat sheet
Which Databricks compute type is created for a single job run and is automatically terminated when that run completes?
Read the clue and guess the term in 6 tries.
Game
Control plane vs. data plane
What does the Databricks File System (DBFS) provide?
First word of the SQL statement that loads files from cloud storage into a Delta table and skips files already loaded.
Data ingestion
A data engineer needs to share notebooks and code with team members while maintaining version history. Which Databricks feature should they use?
Question · Medium
Why the Lakehouse reduces data duplication
Which dbutils command is used to list files in a DBFS directory?
First word of the cloudFiles-based feature that processes new files in cloud storage incrementally without extra setup.
Study Plan and Strategies
What is the main advantage of using Delta Lake over standard Parquet files in a data lake?
Swap tiles to line up three of the same term.
Term Match
Medallion architecture
In Databricks, what is the purpose of a Service Principal?
Spark source for other relational systems that needs a vendor driver on the classpath and a URL shaped as protocol:subprotocol:subname.
On Unity Catalog-enabled compute, which access mode lets multiple users securely share a cluster with table access control and data isolation between users?
Databricks SQL warehouse
What happens when you run the VACUUM command on a Delta table?
Table definition listing each field and its type, which writes are validated against.
Domain 1: Databricks Intelligence Platform (10%)
1.1 The Lakehouse Architecture
A company needs to ensure that sensitive data never leaves their AWS VPC during processing. Which Databricks deployment option meets this requirement?
Question · Hard
Flip two cards at a time to find matching terms.
Term Pairs
Delta Lake transaction log
Delta Lake
An engineer notices that queries on a Delta table are reading more files than expected. After investigating, they find many small files in the table directory. What is the BEST approach to optimize this table?
Operation whose default inner form keeps only rows with matching values in both table references, and which also has left, right, full outer, semi, anti, and cross forms.
Data modeling
Which SQL command is used to create a new Delta table from a query result?
Databricks Elt Spark Sql
ACID transactions in Delta Lake
What is the default format when creating a table in Databricks without specifying USING?
Medallion layer holding highly refined, often aggregated views used for analytics, dashboards, and reporting.
1.2 Databricks Workspace and Components
Which PySpark method is used to display the contents of a DataFrame?
Find five hidden terms in a grid of letters.
Term Search
Time travel
What does the following SQL command do: ALTER TABLE table_name ADD COLUMN new_col INT?
SQL value used when a column's value for a row was not known when the row was created.
Which SQL function returns the current date?
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