Section 1 of the Data Engineer Associate exam is only 6% — roughly 3 of 45 questions. It is tempting to skip it. Don't.
Almost every wrong answer people give on the other 94% traces back to a broken mental model of where compute runs, who owns the storage, and what Unity Catalog actually governs. A question about why a job can't read a table is a networking question wearing a governance costume. This module is the map you'll navigate the rest of the course with.
It's also your de-staling pass. If you learned Databricks any time before mid-2025, between five and eight of the names you know have changed, and at least one code pattern you have muscle memory for no longer matches current docs. Lesson 5 is entirely about that.
By the end you can:
| # | Lesson | Read | Listen |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The lakehouse and the three planes | 18 min | 7 min |
| 2 | Compute: serverless, classic, and access modes | 20 min | 8 min |
| 3 | Unity Catalog's object model | 22 min | 8 min |
| 4 | Delta Lake essentials | 20 min | 7 min |
| 5 | What changed: the 2025–2026 rename map | 15 min | 4 min |
Then: Cheat sheet · Lab · Quiz
Every factual claim in this module links to Databricks' own documentation, release notes, or a peer-reviewed paper. Where Databricks' docs are internally inconsistent — and right now, on pipeline naming, they are — the lesson says so rather than picking one and pretending it's settled.
Facts verified 2026-07-30. Databricks ships changes monthly; see What Changed for how to re-verify.
🎧 37 min of audio. Open any lesson and press Play — or start with lesson 1.