2/18/24, 2:59 PM Professional Data Engineer Certification Exam Guide | Learn | Google Cloud

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Professional Data Engineer

Certification exam guide

A Professional Data Engineer makes data usable and valuable for

others by collecting, transforming, and publishing data. This
individual evaluates and selects products and services to meet
business and regulatory requirements. A Professional Data
Engineer creates and manages robust data processing systems.
This includes the ability to design, build, deploy, monitor, maintain,
and secure data processing workloads.

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Section 1: Designing data processing systems (~22% of the

exam)
1.1 Designing for security and compliance. Considerations include:

● Identity and Access Management (e.g., Cloud IAM and organization

policies)

● Data security (encryption and key management)

● Privacy (e.g., personally identifiable information, and Cloud Data Loss

Prevention API)

● Regional considerations (data sovereignty) for data access and storage

● Legal and regulatory compliance

1.2 Designing for reliability and fidelity. Considerations include:

● Preparing and cleaning data (e.g., Dataprep, Dataflow, and Cloud Data
Fusion)

● Monitoring and orchestration of data pipelines

● Disaster recovery and fault tolerance

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● Making decisions related to ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and

durability) compliance and availability

● Data validation

1.3 Designing for flexibility and portability. Considerations include:

● Mapping current and future business requirements to the architecture

● Designing for data and application portability (e.g., multi-cloud and data
residency requirements)

● Data staging, cataloging, and discovery (data governance)

1.4 Designing data migrations. Considerations include:

● Analyzing current stakeholder needs, users, processes, and technologies

and creating a plan to get to desired state

● Planning migration to Google Cloud (e.g., BigQuery Data Transfer Service,

Database Migration Service, Transfer Appliance, Google Cloud networking,
Datastream)

● Designing the migration validation strategy

● Designing the project, dataset, and table architecture to ensure proper

data governance

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Section 2: Ingesting and processing the data (~25% of the

exam)
2.1 Planning the data pipelines. Considerations include:

● Defining data sources and sinks

● Defining data transformation logic

● Networking fundamentals

● Data encryption

2.2 Building the pipelines. Considerations include:

● Data cleansing

● Identifying the services (e.g., Dataflow, Apache Beam, Dataproc, Cloud

Data Fusion, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Apache Spark, Hadoop ecosystem, and
Apache Kafka)

● Transformations

○ Batch

○ Streaming (e.g., windowing, late arriving data)

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○ Language

○ Ad hoc data ingestion (one-time or automated pipeline)

● Data acquisition and import

● Integrating with new data sources

2.3 Deploying and operationalizing the pipelines. Considerations include:

● Job automation and orchestration (e.g., Cloud Composer and

Workflows)

● CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment)

Section 3: Storing the data (~20% of the exam)

3.1 Selecting storage systems. Considerations include:

● Analyzing data access patterns

● Choosing managed services (e.g., Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, Cloud SQL,

Cloud Storage, Firestore, Memorystore)

● Planning for storage costs and performance

● Lifecycle management of data

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3.2 Planning for using a data warehouse. Considerations include:

● Designing the data model

● Deciding the degree of data normalization

● Mapping business requirements

● Defining architecture to support data access patterns

3.3 Using a data lake. Considerations include:

● Managing the lake (configuring data discovery, access, and cost

controls)

● Processing data

● Monitoring the data lake

3.4 Designing for a data mesh. Considerations include:

● Building a data mesh based on requirements by using Google Cloud

tools (e.g., Dataplex, Data Catalog, BigQuery, Cloud Storage)

● Segmenting data for distributed team usage

● Building a federated governance model for distributed data systems

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Section 4: Preparing and using data for analysis (~15% of

the exam)
4.1 Preparing data for visualization. Considerations include:

● Connecting to tools

● Precalculating fields

● BigQuery materialized views (view logic)

● Determining granularity of time data

● Troubleshooting poor performing queries

● Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Cloud Data Loss Prevention
(Cloud DLP)

4.2 Sharing data. Considerations include:

● Defining rules to share data

● Publishing datasets

● Publishing reports and visualizations

● Analytics Hub

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4.3 Exploring and analyzing data. Considerations include:

● Preparing data for feature engineering (training and serving machine

learning models)

● Conducting data discovery

Section 5: Maintaining and automating data workloads

(~18% of the exam)
5.1 Optimizing resources. Considerations include:

● Minimizing costs per required business need for data

● Ensuring that enough resources are available for business-critical data

processes

● Deciding between persistent or job-based data clusters (e.g., Dataproc)

5.2 Designing automation and repeatability. Considerations include:

● Creating directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) for Cloud Composer

● Scheduling jobs in a repeatable way

5.3 Organizing workloads based on business requirements. Considerations

include:

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● Flex, on-demand, and flat rate slot pricing (index on flexibility or fixed
capacity)

● Interactive or batch query jobs

5.4 Monitoring and troubleshooting processes. Considerations include:

● Observability of data processes (e.g., Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging,

BigQuery admin panel)

● Monitoring planned usage

● Troubleshooting error messages, billing issues, and quotas

● Manage workloads, such as jobs, queries, and compute capacity

(reservations)

5.5 Maintaining awareness of failures and mitigating impact. Considerations

include:

● Designing system for fault tolerance and managing restarts

● Running jobs in multiple regions or zones

● Preparing for data corruption and missing data

● Data replication and failover (e.g., Cloud SQL, Redis clusters)

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