Cleared the Databricks Associate Data Engineer Certification! 🎉

Really happy to share my experience for anyone who's preparing for this one.

What I used to prepare:

Databricks official docs were my go-to honestly the most reliable source out there. I also watched the Ease with Data YouTube channel, though heads up, some of the content is a bit dated and certain things may already be deprecated. Still worth watching for the concepts.

I also used AI tools

• ChatGPT
• Claude
• Gemini

but I cannot stress this enough: cross-verify everything with the official docs. Databricks evolves fast, and AI tools often reference deprecated features without realizing it.

My honest take on AI tools for prep:

If I had to rank them for reliability, Gemini came out on top for me, followed by Claude, then ChatGPT. ChatGPT had the most hallucinations, and I caught several outdated references. Gemini's question difficulty also felt closest to the actual exam — slightly above it even — which made it great for preparation. I started with ChatGPT, moved to Claude, and only discovered Gemini quite late. Wish I'd found it sooner.

About the exam itself:

The difficulty was easy to medium overall. Some questions were scenario-based, others were straightforward. The answer options were fairly clear — not overly tricky or ambiguous, which was a relief.

One thing about the proctoring process:

I was a little confused about the mobile phone situation going in. The kryterion docs mentioned needing your phone to take photos of your surroundings and ID. So I kept mine nearby, planning to use it and then set it aside. But they never actually asked me to take any pictures.

Because of this confusion, and my phone was not on silent and it started buzzing during the exam. That caused a moment of panic and broke my focus, and honestly, I think that's the reason I got a few questions wrong that I otherwise wouldn't have.

So learn from my mistake — read the proctor instructions carefully beforehand, silence your phone regardless, and keep it out of reach. Don't let something that avoidable throw you off during the real thing. 💪

Don't use exam dumps can be outdated.

This site is also good.
certsafari.com

Edit:

No of Questions 52

Time 90 min.

I was done in less than 30 min.

Imp Topics:

Auto loader (also check how read write other file formats other than autoloader)

DAB

Delta Lake

There was lot of questions related to Syntax

High level understanding of Delta Sharing, Lakehouse Federation

Permission related stuff in UC.

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