Free DEA-C01 mock exams

Ingestion and transformation is the largest domain by a clear margin, and it is where the paper concentrates its hardest questions. They are rarely about whether you know a service exists — they are about which of several services that could move the data is the right one given a stated constraint on latency, volume, cost or ordering. Learn the boundaries between the overlapping options rather than the options themselves.

Data-store questions reward knowing access patterns rather than feature lists. The exam repeatedly asks you to match a described query shape to a storage choice, so a mock that goes badly here usually means the underlying model of "what is this store good at" is missing, not that a fact was forgotten.

Governance and security carry the smallest weight but are the most self-contained material on the syllabus, which makes them the most efficient thing to fix between a failed mock and a retake.

Operations and support is the domain most often neglected, because it is about running pipelines rather than building them — orchestration, failure handling, monitoring and cost control. It is also the domain where the questions are most concrete, so it repays targeted study more predictably than the larger ingestion domain does.

Before booking, check that your mock results are not being carried by the ingestion domain alone. Because it is the largest slice, a strong run there can lift an overall score past the line while two smaller domains sit well under it — a profile that passes a mock and fails the real thing on a different draw.