AWS Data Engineer Associate Practice Questions (Free Sample)

Free practice sample

Fifteen original DEA-C01 practice questions, unlocked with no signup and instant scoring. The sample is spread across all four domains at blueprint proportions, so it reflects the shape of the real exam rather than a single topic slice.

Roughly sixty percent of the real exam places you in a business situation and asks which service or architectural approach fits, not which feature belongs to which service. That is where the difficulty lives: Firehose or Kinesis Data Streams, Glue or EMR, Lake Formation or bucket policies. Several answers will work and one fits the constraint in the stem. Every explanation here names the winner and the near miss it beats.

Vendor · AWS Code · DEA-C01 Questions · 65 Duration · 130 min Pass · 720 / 1000 scaled Cost · $150 USD 4 domains Level · Associate
Data Ingestion and Transformation Domain 1 · 34%
Data Store Management Domain 2 · 26%
Data Operations and Support Domain 3 · 22%
Data Security and Governance Domain 4 · 18%

AWS Data Engineer Associate Practice Questions

  1. Question 1 of 15Data Ingestion and Transformation

    Clickstream events arrive at roughly 8,000 records per second and must land in Amazon S3 in Parquet format with minimal operational overhead. Which approach fits best?

  2. Question 2 of 15Data Ingestion and Transformation

    A nightly job must apply the same transformation logic to files whose schema changes occasionally as upstream teams add columns. Which AWS Glue feature reduces the maintenance burden?

  3. Question 3 of 15Data Ingestion and Transformation

    A pipeline must join streaming order events with a slowly changing product dimension and emit enriched records within seconds. Which service handles the streaming join?

  4. Question 4 of 15Data Ingestion and Transformation

    A Glue job reprocesses the entire source dataset on every run even though only new files arrive. Which feature prevents the duplicate work?

  5. Question 5 of 15Data Store Management

    Analysts query a large S3 dataset filtering almost always on event_date. Which change most improves query performance and cost in Amazon Athena?

  6. Question 6 of 15Data Store Management

    A Redshift table is queried almost exclusively by joining on customer_id across billions of rows. Which distribution style is most appropriate?

  7. Question 7 of 15Data Store Management

    Raw ingest data must remain immediately queryable for 30 days, then be retained cheaply for seven years with rare access. What is the most cost-effective design?

  8. Question 8 of 15Data Store Management

    A team needs a single catalogue of table definitions that Athena, Glue, EMR, and Redshift Spectrum can all read. Which service provides it?

  9. Question 9 of 15Data Operations and Support

    A nightly pipeline has several dependent steps, and the team needs retries, branching on failure, and a visual run history. Which service fits best?

  10. Question 10 of 15Data Operations and Support

    Downstream reports occasionally contain null customer identifiers, and the team wants the pipeline to detect this automatically before publishing. Which capability applies?

  11. Question 11 of 15Data Operations and Support

    A Redshift query that normally finishes in under a minute now runs for over an hour after a large data load. What is the most likely first thing to check?

  12. Question 12 of 15Data Security and Governance

    Analysts in one business unit must see a table without the salary column, while the finance team sees all columns. Which service enforces this centrally across Athena and Redshift Spectrum?

  13. Question 13 of 15Data Security and Governance

    A data lake may contain personal information that arrived without being classified. Which service is designed to discover and report it?

  14. Question 14 of 15Data Security and Governance

    An auditor asks who read a specific S3 object containing regulated data and when. What must be enabled to answer this?

  15. Question 15 of 15Data Security and Governance

    A pipeline needs a database password to connect to Amazon RDS, with automatic rotation and no credentials in source control. Which service should be used?

Untimed, no account needed. Your score appears instantly. Add your email afterwards if you want the explanation for every question and a copy of your results.

Frequently asked questions about DEA-C01

How many questions are on the actual DEA-C01 exam?

65 questions in 130 minutes of working time. Questions are scenario-based rather than recall-based, roughly sixty percent place you in a business situation and ask which service or architectural approach is most appropriate. Confirm current logistics at aws.amazon.com/certification when you book.

What score do I need to pass DEA-C01?

720 out of 1000 on the AWS scaled scoring system. The scaled score is not a raw percentage and the scoring math varies by exam form, but 72% is the honest raw-score equivalent and is the pass mark Certifym uses on every practice set for this exam.

Which domain should I spend the most time on?

Data Ingestion and Transformation, at 34%, the heaviest domain by a wide margin. It covers batch versus streaming trade-offs, file formats such as Parquet, Avro and ORC, compression and partitioning choices, and the small-files problem. Data Security and Governance is lightest at 18%.

What does the exam cost?

$150 USD, the standard AWS associate-tier registration fee.

What experience do I need before sitting it?

The exam targets working data engineers with roughly two to three years of data engineering experience and one to two years of hands-on AWS. That is a recommended profile rather than an enforced one. There is no prerequisite certification and no experience check at registration.

How hard is DEA-C01?

It tests judgment rather than memorisation. The difficulty comes from telling near-equivalent architectures apart under a stated constraint, so candidates who have actually built and operated pipelines on AWS find it far more tractable than candidates studying service documentation alone.

How is this free sample different from the full Certifym bank?

The sample is a fixed 15-question set spread across the four domains at blueprint proportions. Each full Certifym practice exam is a 65-item set matching the real exam in shape and scenario style, timed at 130 minutes with the same 72% pass mark. None of the paid-bank items appear in this sample.

Is Certifym affiliated with AWS?

No. Certifym.net is operated by Certifym Exam Services, LLC and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Amazon Web Services, Inc. All questions and explanations on this site are original content produced by Certifym and are not sourced from actual AWS exam questions.

Related AWS certifications

SAA-C03Solutions Architect Associate MLA-C01Machine Learning Engineer Associate SOA-C03CloudOps Engineer Associate DVA-C02Developer Associate CLF-C02Cloud Practitioner DOP-C02DevOps Engineer Professional

Trademark notice & independence. Certifym.net is operated by Certifym Exam Services, LLC and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Amazon Web Services, Inc. AWS, Amazon Web Services, and the AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate credential are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, used here only for identification. The DEA-C01 exam domains and blueprint weightings are the property of AWS; download the current official exam guide at aws.amazon.com/certification.

All practice questions, answers, and explanations on this page are original content produced by Certifym Exam Services, LLC. They are not actual AWS examination questions and are not represented as such. Exam format, domain weights, and cost are set by AWS and may change; verify current details before scheduling.