AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01) exam objectives
Amazon Web Services publishes 4 exam domains with official weightings. The weight tells you where your marks come from, so your study time should roughly follow it.
DEA-C01AssociateIntermediate
1. Data Ingestion and Transformation
34%- Streaming and batch ingestion with Kinesis, MSK, DMS, Glue and Lambda
- Transformation with Glue ETL, EMR/Spark and SQL-based pipelines
- Orchestration, scheduling, retries and idempotency across pipeline stages
- Handling late-arriving, malformed and skewed data without silent loss
2. Data Store Management
26%- Choosing the store to fit the access pattern: S3, Redshift, DynamoDB, RDS
- Partitioning, file formats and compression, and what they cost at query time
- Schema design and evolution, including the Glue Data Catalog
- Lifecycle, tiering and retention across a data lake
3. Data Operations and Support
22%- Monitoring pipelines and diagnosing failures from CloudWatch and job logs
- Performance tuning: distribution and sort keys, partition pruning, concurrency
- Data quality checks, and validating that a pipeline produced what it claims
- Cost control across storage, scan volume and compute
4. Data Security and Governance
18%- IAM and Lake Formation permissions, including row and column level control
- Encryption with KMS, key rotation, and protecting data in transit and at rest
- PII handling: masking, tokenisation, and classification
- Auditing, lineage and meeting retention or residency requirements
Our practice exam spreads its questions across these exact domains at these weightings, so your score in each one tells you precisely where you stand.
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