AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01) Practice Exam
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Exam domains
The DEA-C01 questions are grouped into 4 domains divided into 17 tasks.
DEA-C01 example questions
One example question per domain from the DEA-C01 question bank, with the correct answer and its explanation. Sign in to the simulator to answer them with all answer options.
A company uses Amazon EventBridge Scheduler to start an AWS Glue ingestion job every night. Occasionally, the StartJobRun API request fails because of transient throttling, so the job never starts. The company wants failed delivery attempts to be retried for up to 1 hour and any request that remains undelivered to be retained in an Amazon SQS queue for investigation. The solution must not require custom code. An existing Scheduler execution role trusts scheduler.amazonaws.com and has permission to start the job and send messages to the queue. Which solution meets these requirements?
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CORRECT ANSWERKeep the Glue StartJobRun target. Configure the schedule's retry policy with a maximum event age of 3,600 seconds and 185 retry attempts. Configure the SQS queue as the schedule's dead-letter queue.
Scheduler's retry policy handles failures to invoke the target API. The maximum event age limits delivery retries to 1 hour, while the retry count permits repeated attempts with backoff. After delivery attempts are exhausted, Scheduler sends the undelivered event to the configured SQS dead-letter queue using the execution role.
A company stores temporary job-status records in an Amazon DynamoDB table with tenantId as the partition key and jobId as the sort key. Each record must expire 24 hours after creation. After expiration, records must become eligible for automatic deletion without scheduled cleanup jobs. Physical deletion can be delayed, but the application's Query requests must not return expired records. Which solution meets these requirements?
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CORRECT ANSWERStore expiresAt as a Number containing the expiration time in Unix epoch seconds. Enable TTL on expiresAt, and add a Query filter expression that requires expiresAt to be greater than the current Unix epoch time in seconds.
DynamoDB TTL requires a Number attribute containing an expiration timestamp in Unix epoch seconds. Deletion is asynchronous, so expired items can remain readable until DynamoDB deletes them. A Query filter that excludes expired records prevents those items from appearing in the application's results during that interval.
A company exposes reference datasets through an Amazon API Gateway REST API. An AWS Lambda function must retrieve data by calling GET /datasets/daily in the API's prod stage. The method uses AWS_IAM authorization, and API keys are not required. The function signs its HTTPS requests correctly by using its execution role's temporary credentials. However, requests receive an authorization error. The execution role allows apigateway:GET, which lets the function retrieve API configuration, but has no other API Gateway permissions. The function and API are in the same AWS account, and no resource policies, permissions boundaries, service control policies, or explicit denies restrict access. Which change will allow the function to retrieve the dataset while following least privilege?
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CORRECT ANSWERGrant the execution role execute-api:Invoke on arn:aws:execute-api:<region>:<account-id>:<api-id>/prod/GET/datasets/daily.
Calling a deployed API method is a data-plane operation authorized by execute-api:Invoke. Scoping the permission to the API, stage, HTTP method, and resource path permits only the required dataset request.
A company uses Amazon Athena to query an employee table in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. The table's Amazon S3 location is registered with AWS Lake Formation. An analyst IAM role currently has Lake Formation SELECT permission on the entire table and all required IAM permissions to run Athena queries. The role has no direct read access to the source S3 objects, and no other Lake Formation grants apply to the role. A new security requirement allows analysts to query all columns except salary and national_id. Analysts must continue writing their own SQL against the existing table, without creating views or copying data. Which change will enforce this requirement with the least privilege?
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CORRECT ANSWERRevoke the existing table-level SELECT permission. Grant the analyst role Lake Formation SELECT permission on only the columns other than salary and national_id.
Lake Formation column-level SELECT permissions let Athena enforce access to the approved columns. Revoking the unrestricted grant removes the broader access that would otherwise allow analysts to query the sensitive columns.
Exam mode and practice mode
| Exam mode | Practice mode | |
|---|---|---|
| Questions count | 65 | 1 - 75 |
| Time limit | 130 minutes | Optional, 10 - 200 minutes |
| Exam scope | 4 domains with the official questions ratio | Selected domains with the official questions ratio |
| Correct answers | After exam submission | After exam submission or after each answer |
| Question types | Mix of single and multiple correct answers | Single, multiple or both |
| Question hints | Never | Optional |
| Question domain | Revealed after exam submission | Revealed after submission or during the exam |
| Scoring | 15 of 65 questions do not count towards the result | Official AWS method or mathematical mean |
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About the DEA-C01 exam
The AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01) exam is recognized as a demanding certification that validates a candidate's expertise in managing and optimizing data-driven workflows within the AWS ecosystem. While this exam is geared towards professionals with a background in data engineering, it is by no means an easy feat and requires a thorough understanding of both foundational and advanced AWS data services.
The DEA-C01 exam covers a broad range of topics, including but not limited to, data ingestion, transformation, storage, and visualization within AWS. Candidates must demonstrate a solid grasp of essential AWS data services such as Amazon Redshift, Glue, S3, and Kinesis, along with a deep understanding of how to architect and maintain scalable, secure, and high-performing data pipelines.
A critical component of the exam focuses on data processing frameworks like Apache Spark and Hadoop, as well as an understanding of database services, both relational (RDS, Aurora) and non-relational (DynamoDB). Additionally, the exam tests the candidate's ability to apply machine learning workflows using services like Amazon SageMaker within a data engineering context.
Security and compliance are integral to the exam, emphasizing the need for candidates to understand AWS's shared responsibility model and implement best practices for data governance, encryption, and access management. Services such as IAM, KMS, and AWS Lake Formation are frequently tested to ensure candidates can securely manage data at scale.
In this exam, candidates are also expected to distinguish between various data storage and retrieval solutions, optimizing them based on specific use cases and cost considerations. This includes knowing when to utilize services like S3 for unstructured data versus using Redshift for structured data analytics.
Overall, the questions in the DEA-C01 exam are designed to challenge both theoretical knowledge and practical application, with scenarios that require candidates to design, implement, and optimize complex data architectures. While the exam avoids overly complicated wording, the difficulty lies in the depth of knowledge requi
Technologies and concepts
Legal Holds
A legal hold preserves information needed for litigation, investigations, or other legal obligations, usually without a predetermined expiration date. In cloud environments, engineers translate that obligation into enforceable storage and backup controls, supported by access restrictions, audit records, and reliable retrieval procedures.
Services on the exam
All 70 AWS services that can appear on the DEA-C01 exam.