DEA-C01 Exam Study Guide

Master the AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate exam (DEA-C01) with this comprehensive independent study guide — complete coverage of all four exam domains, 500+ practice questions, and proven exam strategies for 2026.

What's Inside:

Domain 1 — Data Ingestion & Transformation (34%)
Complete coverage of Amazon Kinesis (Data Streams vs Firehose vs Analytics — all three compared in depth), Enhanced Fan-Out for multiple consumers, Kinesis Firehose mandatory S3 intermediate for Redshift delivery, AWS Glue (Data Catalog, crawlers, ETL jobs, DynamicFrames, DataBrew, Data Quality, Schema Registry, Job Bookmarks, Streaming ETL), AWS DMS full load and CDC replication patterns, AWS DataSync, Transfer Family, Snow Family, and Amazon MSK (Managed Kafka) with Provisioned vs Serverless comparison.

Domain 2 — Data Store Management (26%)
Amazon S3 for data engineering (partitioning, Parquet vs ORC vs Avro vs Iceberg, event notifications, Object Lambda), AWS Lake Formation (column-level, row-level, and cell-level security, LF-Tags, governed tables, cross-account sharing via RAM), Amazon Redshift (distribution styles, sort keys, Spectrum, Serverless, COPY/UNLOAD, Materialized Views, WLM, Data Sharing, Row-Level Security, Zero-ETL), DynamoDB Streams and exports for analytics, OpenSearch, and ElastiCache.

Domain 3 — Data Operations & Support (22%)
Pipeline orchestration tools compared (Glue Workflows, Step Functions, MWAA/Airflow, EventBridge), Amazon Athena optimization (partitioning, Parquet conversion, CTAS, workgroups, Federated Query, query result reuse, Iceberg tables), Amazon EMR (node types, Serverless, EMRFS, Spot for Task nodes, transient clusters, bootstrap actions), and monitoring patterns (IteratorAgeMilliseconds for Kinesis lag, CDCLatencyTarget for DMS, Glue job metrics, Athena DataScannedInBytes).

Domain 4 — Data Security & Governance (18%)
Lake Formation fine-grained access control (setup, column security, row security, LF-Tags, cross-account), data encryption patterns (S3 SSE-KMS, Redshift CMK at creation, Kinesis encryption, Glue security configuration, cross-account KMS), Amazon Macie for PII discovery at scale, CloudTrail data events audit trail, and VPC endpoint patterns for private data lake access.

Also includes:

500+ practice questions across 5 full practice sets with detailed explanations

30+ service decision cheat sheet mappings (keyword → correct service)

20-term glossary covering Parquet, Iceberg, EFO, bookmarks, EMRFS, Schema Registry

Architecture patterns: Lambda, Kappa, Medallion, Event-Driven, CDC Pipeline

15-point exam day strategy with guaranteed exam questions called out

8-week study plan with weekly focus areas and lab suggestions

This is an independent, unofficial study resource. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon Web Services or any certification body.