Data Engineer Associate · Databricks
Taking Databricks Data Engineer Associate? Its exam guide has changed
Databricks has swapped the exam guide for the Data Engineer Associate. What changed, what stayed the same, and what to check in your study material before you book.
The certification page for the Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate now links to a new exam guide, marked "Exam Guide Updated August 6, 2026". The exam itself has not moved: the guide still says "Exam Published May 4, 2026", so the version you sit is the same one that went live in May.
The short answer for your study plan: the seven sections and their weights are identical, and no objective was added or removed. What changed is the wording of some objectives, the exam details, and the sample questions.
What stayed the same
| Section | Weight |
|---|---|
| 1. Databricks Intelligence Platform | 6% |
| 2. Data Ingestion and Loading | 21% |
| 3. Data Transformation and Modeling | 22% |
| 4. Working with Lakeflow Jobs | 16% |
| 5. Implementing CI/CD | 10% |
| 6. Troubleshooting, Monitoring, and Optimization | 10% |
| 7. Governance and Security | 15% |
The exam is still 45 scored questions in 90 minutes.
What changed in the objectives
Only names. If your notes use the older terms, they still describe the same skills:
- Databricks Platform replaces "Databricks Data Intelligence Platform" in the platform objectives.
- Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines replaces "Lakeflow Spark Declarative Pipelines" in the CI/CD section.
- Declarative Automation Bundles replaces "Automation Bundles" in the objective about configuring environments.
The rest are typo and format fixes, such as "Unity Catalog" written as two words.
What changed in the exam details
- The guide now says the exam can include up to 10 unscored items on top of the 45 scored ones. They do not count toward your result, but they take time, so plan your pacing for the full set.
- To recertify, the guide now mentions a renewal exam option. The May guide only said to take the current live exam.
- It lists the languages on offer: English, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and Korean.
The sample questions are different
The May guide had five sample questions with an answer key. The August guide has seven, with no answer key. Some of the old ones are reworded or mapped to a different objective, and two are new: one on passing a secret to a Declarative Automation Bundle through a bundle variable, and one on column masking and row-level security.
The sample questions show the style of the exam, not its content. Without an answer key, the useful exercise is to map each one to its objective and check that you can justify every option.
What to do
If you studied from the May guide, you do not need to start again. Check that your material covers the same objectives under the new names, and read the exam details section of the August guide before you book. Databricks itself recommends checking the guide two weeks before your exam date.