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Associate · DEA-C01Prep available

AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01) practice exam and study path

A free, timed 65-question DEA-C01 practice exam — 130 minutes, the same length as the real exam, scored by domain, with every option explained after you submit. Also 150 practice questions you can check one at a time, a page for every task in the exam guide, and a study path. No sign-up.

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Data Engineer - Associate exam pack:

$29once

For people who build data pipelines: ingesting and transforming data, choosing and modeling data stores, operating pipelines, and governing data.

The exam

Exam code
DEA-C01
Questions
65 questions (50 scored)
Time
130 minutes
Passing score
720 of 1,000 (scaled)
Exam fee
$150 (USD)
Question types
multiple choice, multiple response

Exam guide version 1.1 (December 12, 2025) added open table formats, vector indexes, LLMs in data processing and Amazon SageMaker Catalog.

From AWS's certification page and exam guide, checked Oct 10, 2026. The exam is scored as a whole (compensatory): there is no pass mark per domain.

Domains and weights

  • Domain 1: Data Ingestion and Transformation

    34%

  • Domain 2: Data Store Management

    26%

  • Domain 3: Data Operations and Support

    22%

  • Domain 4: Data Security and Governance

    18%

On our roadmap this comes after Solutions Architect - Associate. See the whole roadmap.

Practice

150 original practice questions, every option explained with the AWS documentation page that proves it. Free, no sign-up; progress stays on this device.

Your results on this device →

More practice exams

The lessons, the sample questions on every task page and the first full practice exam are free and stay free. A pack adds the further timed DEA-C01 practice exams.

Data Engineer - Associate exam pack

$29once

  • Every paid DEA-C01 practice exam, timed, with every option explained
  • The next version of this exam included when it changes
  • Lifetime access — one payment, no subscription
  • 14-day refund, no conditions
  • 14-day refund, no conditions: ask within 14 days of buying and you get the whole payment back.
  • No pass guarantee. These are practice exams written by us from the exam guide and the AWS documentation; a score here does not predict your result on the real exam.

Study path

One module per exam domain. Lessons that already exist on BytePatterns are linked; the rest are being written.

  1. Module 1: Data Ingestion and Transformation

    1. 1Streaming ingestion: Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Data Firehose, MSK and DynamoDB StreamsTask 1.1

      Partly covered by: Message Queues, Design Ad Click Aggregation

    2. 2Batch ingestion: S3, AWS DMS, AppFlow and JDBC sourcesTask 1.1, 1.2

      Lesson coming

    3. 3Triggers and schedules: S3 Event Notifications, EventBridge rules and SchedulerTask 1.1

      Partly covered by: Lambda & Event-Driven Design, SQS vs SNS vs EventBridge

    4. 4Lambda as a stream consumer: batching, retries and partial failuresTask 1.1, 1.4

      Partly covered by: Lambda & Event-Driven Design

    5. 5Throttling, rate limits, fan-in and fan-out, and replaying a pipelineTask 1.1

      Partly covered by: Backpressure, Rate Limiting

    6. 6Choosing the engine: AWS Glue, Amazon EMR, Lambda or RedshiftTask 1.2

      Lesson coming

    7. 7File formats: CSV to Parquet, compression and partitioned outputTask 1.2

      Lesson coming

    8. 8Fixing slow and failing Spark jobs on Glue and EMRTask 1.2

      Lesson coming

    9. 9Data APIs with API Gateway, Lambda and the Redshift Data APITask 1.2

      Partly covered by: Designing a REST API

    10. 10LLMs in a pipeline: Amazon Bedrock for extraction and enrichmentTask 1.2

      Partly covered by: What Is an LLM, The Tool-Use Loop

    11. 11Containers for data processing: ECS, EKS and EMR on EKSTask 1.2

      Partly covered by: ECS vs EKS vs Fargate

    12. 12Orchestration: Step Functions, Amazon MWAA, Glue workflows and EventBridgeTask 1.3

      Partly covered by: SQS vs SNS vs EventBridge

    13. 13Resilient pipelines: retries, dead-letter queues and alerts with SNS and SQSTask 1.3

      Partly covered by: Message Queues

    14. 14Lambda concurrency, memory and storage for data jobsTask 1.4

      Partly covered by: Lambda & Event-Driven Design

    15. 15Infrastructure as code and CI/CD for pipelines: CloudFormation, the CDK and AWS SAMTask 1.4

      Lesson coming

    16. 16Distributed computing, trees and graphs for data engineersTask 1.4

      Partly covered by: Graph Basics, Tree Basics

  2. Module 2: Data Store Management

    1. 17Choosing a store: Redshift, RDS and Aurora, DynamoDB, MemoryDB and S3Task 2.1

      Partly covered by: RDS vs DynamoDB, SQL vs NoSQL

    2. 18Querying in place: Redshift Spectrum, federated queries and materialized viewsTask 2.1

      Lesson coming

    3. 19Locks and concurrent writes in Redshift and RDSTask 2.1

      Partly covered by: Transactions & ACID, Isolation Levels

    4. 20Open table formats: Apache Iceberg and Amazon S3 TablesTask 2.1

      Lesson coming

    5. 21Vector search: HNSW and IVF indexes, pgvector on Aurora PostgreSQLTask 2.1, 2.4

      Partly covered by: Approximate Neighbours, Vector Databases

    6. 22Moving files in: AWS Transfer Family and DataSyncTask 2.1

      Partly covered by: Moving Data Into AWS

    7. 23The Glue Data Catalog: crawlers, partitions and connectionsTask 2.2

      Lesson coming

    8. 24Business catalogs: Amazon SageMaker CatalogTask 2.2

      Lesson coming

    9. 25COPY and UNLOAD between S3 and RedshiftTask 2.3

      Lesson coming

    10. 26S3 Lifecycle, versioning and DynamoDB TTLTask 2.3

      Partly covered by: S3: Consistency, Classes, Lifecycle

    11. 27Deleting data for legal reasons and keeping it availableTask 2.3

      Partly covered by: Database Replication

    12. 28Modeling for queries: Redshift distribution and sort keys, DynamoDB keys and indexesTask 2.4

      Partly covered by: Indexes, Composite Indexes, Database Sharding

    13. 29Partitioning, compression and schema evolutionTask 2.4

      Lesson coming

    14. 30Schema conversion with AWS DMS and lineage in SageMakerTask 2.4

      Lesson coming

    15. 31Vectorization: embeddings and Amazon Bedrock Knowledge BasesTask 2.4

      Partly covered by: Embeddings, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Chunking and Reranking

  3. Module 3: Data Operations and Support

    1. 32Automating with MWAA, Step Functions, Lambda and EventBridge, and fixing failed runsTask 3.1

      Partly covered by: Lambda & Event-Driven Design

    2. 33Preparing data: AWS Glue DataBrew and SageMaker Unified StudioTask 3.1

      Lesson coming

    3. 34Querying S3 with Athena: partitions, formats and workgroupsTask 3.1, 3.2

      Lesson coming

    4. 35SQL for analysis: aggregations, grouping, pivots and viewsTask 3.2

      Partly covered by: Aggregations & GROUP BY, INNER and OUTER JOINs, CTEs and Recursion

    5. 36Rolling averages and window functionsTask 3.2

      Partly covered by: Window Functions

    6. 37Dashboards and notebooks: Amazon Quick Sight and Athena for Apache SparkTask 3.2

      Lesson coming

    7. 38Provisioned or serverless: Redshift, EMR and Athena comparedTask 3.2

      Partly covered by: AWS Cost Levers

    8. 39Monitoring pipelines: CloudWatch metrics, logs and alarmsTask 3.3

      Partly covered by: CloudWatch, Alarms & X-Ray, Observability Basics

    9. 40Troubleshooting Glue and EMR jobs; analyzing logs with Logs Insights, Athena and OpenSearchTask 3.3

      Partly covered by: Reading a Query Plan

    10. 41Data quality rules: AWS Glue Data Quality and DataBrewTask 3.4

      Lesson coming

    11. 42Sampling and data skewTask 3.4

      Partly covered by: Database Sharding

  4. Module 4: Data Security and Governance

    1. 43IAM roles for data services, security groups and VPC endpointsTask 4.1

      Partly covered by: Shared Responsibility & IAM, VPC: Subnets, NAT & Firewalls

    2. 44Credentials: Secrets Manager rotation and Parameter StoreTask 4.1, 4.2

      Lesson coming

    3. 45SageMaker Unified Studio domains, domain units and projectsTask 4.1, 4.5

      Lesson coming

    4. 46Least-privilege policies and tag- and attribute-based accessTask 4.2

      Partly covered by: Shared Responsibility & IAM

    5. 47Lake Formation permissions and database grants in RedshiftTask 4.2

      Lesson coming

    6. 48Encryption with KMS, across accounts and in transit; masking sensitive dataTask 4.3

      Lesson coming

    7. 49Audit logs: CloudTrail, CloudTrail Lake and CloudWatch LogsTask 4.4

      Partly covered by: CloudWatch, Alarms & X-Ray

    8. 50Governance: Redshift data sharing, Macie, Region controls, AWS Config and data sovereigntyTask 4.5

      Lesson coming

Every task in the exam guide

The exam guide splits each domain into task statements. Each one has a page with a short summary, the lessons that teach it and open sample questions.

Domain 1: Data Ingestion and Transformation

Domain 2: Data Store Management

Domain 3: Data Operations and Support

Domain 4: Data Security and Governance

How these questions are made

  • Written by us from the exam guide's task statements and the AWS documentation — never from real exam content.
  • Every option carries its own explanation and a link to the AWS page that proves it.
  • A question enters a timed exam only after an independent check; until then it is a practice question.
  • Results are a plain percentage, per domain too — not an imitation of AWS's scaled score.

Questions about the DEA-C01 practice exam

Is the DEA-C01 practice exam free?
Yes. The full practice exam (65 questions, 130 minutes) is free with no sign-up, and so are the 150 practice questions, the task pages and the study path. Your attempts are saved in this browser, on this device.
How many questions does it have, and is it timed?
65 questions in 130 minutes: the same number of questions and the same time as the real DEA-C01 exam. When the time runs out, the exam is submitted as it stands, and unanswered questions count as wrong.
Are the answers explained?
After you submit, not during: like the real exam, the timed exam gives no feedback until the end. Then you get your score overall and per exam domain, and every question with each option explained and a link to the AWS documentation page behind it. In practice mode an answer is explained as soon as you check it.
What does the Data Engineer - Associate exam pack add?
3 more timed practice exams (Practice exam 1: 65 questions, 130 minutes; Practice exam 2: 65 questions, 130 minutes; Practice exam 3: 65 questions, 130 minutes), each scored and explained the same way, and the next version of this exam when it changes. One payment, lifetime access, no subscription. Everything above stays free. See the pack.
Can I get a refund?
Yes, with no conditions: ask within 14 days of buying and you get the whole payment back. The details are in the terms.
Is this an official AWS practice exam?
No. BytePatterns is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Amazon Web Services. Every question is written by us from the public exam guide and the AWS documentation, never from real exam content, and a score here does not predict your result on the real exam. AWS lists its own preparation resources on its certification page.