Databricks Learning Paths, Projects, Cheatsheets, Certification Prep

Learning Paths

Step-by-step roadmaps from junior to senior. Curated courses, tutorials, and projects organized by skill level.

Become a Junior Databricks Data Engineer Ingestion patterns, jobs, orchestration, data quality, Associate prep. Become a Mid Databricks Data Engineer Medallion design, streaming, optimization, governance, Pro cert readiness.

Certification Prep

Pass Databricks exams faster. Study guides, practice tests, and resources organized by exam objectives - Associate, Professional, and Spark Developer.

Lakehouse Fundamentals Prep for the Lakehouse Fundamentals accreditation. Data Engineer Associate Prep path, official courses, and practice exams. Data Engineer Professional Advanced prep with optimization and best practices. Associate Developer for Apache Spark Developer-focused prep for the PySpark certification.

Hands-On Projects (GitHub Repos)

Build portfolio-ready projects. Fork ready-to-run GitHub repos and practice DLT pipelines, optimization techniques, and certification prep - all on Databricks Free Edition.

Delta Lake Optimization Techniques Baseline a query, apply six optimizations, and compare files scanned, bytes processed, and runtime. DLT Apparel Streaming Pipeline Build a Delta Live Tables streaming pipeline using a synthetic data generator to mimic real-time events. PySpark Certification Zenith Hands-on PySpark exercises aligned to certification objectives; run on Free Edition. Data Engineer Associate Cert Prep Exam-aligned labs and checklists covering Delta Lake, Spark SQL, streaming, and ingestion patterns.

Quick Reference Cheatsheets

Practical, minimal references to keep you moving fast - just the 80/20 you'll use daily.

dbutils Cheatsheet Filesystem, secrets, notebooks, widgets, libraries, jobs. PySpark Data Manipulation Diagnostics, cleaning, transformations, aggregations, windows, joins. Delta Lake Maintenance Safe DDL, schema evolution, housekeeping, time travel, CDF, monitoring, cleanup. Delta Lake Optimization OPTIMIZE, Z-ORDER, Liquid Clustering, partitioning, VACUUM, and health checks. Unity Catalog Admin & Security Catalog/schema setup, grants, external locations, row/column security, SPNs, auditing. Soda Core Data quality checks, scans, metrics and monitoring for pipelines. PySpark Configuration spark.conf settings for performance, memory, SQL, Delta, Photon.

Weekly Databricks Guides & Deep Dives

Tens of actionable posts published weekly - optimization playbooks, interview deep dives, troubleshooting runbooks, and system design walkthroughs.

Get practical guides delivered to your inbox covering:

Step-by-step playbooks - Cluster optimization, Delta Lake tuning, and cost reduction strategies
Interview deep dives - "Killer" questions on Spark internals, Delta transactions, and system design
Decision guides & checklists - When to use partitioning vs. clustering, ingestion patterns, SCD strategies
Runbooks & troubleshooting - Fix data skew, slow queries, and OOM errors using Spark UI
Code snippets & cheat sheets - PySpark transformations, dbutils commands, data cleaning patterns
Junior vs. Senior comparisons - Mindset shifts and architectural thinking that separate levels

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Contact

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Email: hi@dataengineer.wiki