Packaging and deploying jobs and pipelines with Automation Bundles
Declarative Automation Bundles (formerly Databricks Asset Bundles) let teams define jobs, pipelines, and other workspace assets as YAML source files that can be validated, deployed, and run consistently across environments. Bundles are managed with the Databricks CLI and typically follow a databricks.yml root config with environment-specific target overrides for dev, test, and prod.
Must-know
- A bundle is defined by a databricks.yml file at the project root, which can include resource definitions (jobs, pipelines) directly or reference separate YAML files under a resources folder.
- Bundles use targets to define per-environment configuration (e.g., dev, staging, prod), allowing overrides such as workspace host,
run_asidentity, and resource-level settings without duplicating the whole config. - The core CLI workflow is databricks bundle validate, databricks bundle deploy, and databricks bundle run, executed against a chosen target with the -t flag.
- Deploying a bundle uploads source files and notebooks to a workspace path and creates or updates the corresponding jobs/pipelines as defined, enabling reproducible, version-controlled deployments instead of manual UI configuration.
- Bundle configuration supports variables and substitutions so common values (catalog names, cluster specs, paths) can be parameterized and reused across targets and resources.
- Default dev targets typically deploy resources scoped to the deploying user (e.g., prefixed job names, isolated paths) to avoid collisions, while prod targets are configured with fixed names and explicit
run_asservice principals or users.
A data engineer defines a Databricks Asset Bundle with a databricks.yml containing a base configuration and separate target blocks for dev, test, and prod. The prod target should deploy jobs under a service principal rather than the individual developer's identity. Which configuration accomplishes this?
What you have tried across Databricks DEA's objectives, not a readiness score.
Databricks Intelligence Platform
Data Ingestion and Loading
- Batch, streaming, and incremental loading patterns, and where the data comes from
- Loading files from cloud storage into governed tables with COPY INTO
- Landing data with Auto Loader, and handling schema enforcement and evolution
- Setting up Lakeflow Connect to ingest from enterprise sources reliably
- Pulling data through JDBC, ODBC, or REST clients and scheduling the job
- Choosing the right ingestion method for a given volume, frequency, and governance need
- Bringing semi-structured and unstructured data into governed Delta tables
Data Transformation and Modeling
- Cleaning bronze data into silver tables with PySpark and SQL
- Joining and combining DataFrames with the different join and union types
- Reshaping columns, rows, and arrays in a table
- Deduplicating and aggregating DataFrames
- Tuning Spark's core parameters and measuring what changed
- Building Gold-layer views and tables for BI and analytics
- Validating Silver and Gold datasets for quality
Working with Lakeflow Jobs
Implementing CI/CD
- Branching, committing, and opening pull requests from inside the Databricks workspace
- Promoting one codebase across dev, test, and prod with bundle variables and overrides
- Packaging and deploying jobs and pipelines with Automation Bundles
- Validating and managing bundle deployments from the Databricks CLI
Troubleshooting, Monitoring, and Optimization
- Spotting performance trends in a job's run history
- Reading job status, task graphs, and failure rates to monitor pipeline health
- Diagnosing skew, shuffle, and spill from Spark UI stage metrics
- What Liquid Clustering and predictive optimization actually do
- Diagnosing cluster startup failures, library conflicts, and out-of-memory errors
Governance and Security
Coverage checked against the published exam guide on Jul 26, 2026.
These are independent practice questions, written against this certification's published exam guide. They are not the certification vendor's own questions, and not the real exam.