About This Study Plan
This 7-day study plan breaks the DEA-C01 (AWS Data Engineer Associate) exam preparation into 7 focused study sessions with a total of 28 actionable tasks. The plan covers all 4 exam domains — Data Ingestion and Transformation, Data Store Management, Data Operations and Support, Data Security and Governance — ensuring complete coverage of the exam blueprint. A focused one-week plan for candidates with AWS data experience who need a fast DEA-C01 review.
Prerequisites
- Hands-on familiarity with AWS data services (S3, Glue, Kinesis, Redshift)
- 3-5 hours of focused study time per day
- Willingness to review wrong answers immediately
Study Schedule
- Review AWS Glue: crawlers, Data Catalog, ETL jobs, DynamicFrames, and job bookmarks
- Study DMS: full-load, CDC, schema conversion, and replication instances
- Review data format conversion (CSV, JSON, Parquet, ORC) and compression
- Take a data ingestion quiz and note missed ETL patterns
- Compare Kinesis Data Streams vs Firehose vs Data Analytics
- Study MSK brokers, topics, partitions, and MSK Connect
- Review Lambda triggers for S3 events and Kinesis streams
- Run Glue and Kinesis flashcards
- Review S3 data lake design: partitioning, formats, lifecycle, and Intelligent-Tiering
- Study Redshift: distribution styles, sort keys, COPY, UNLOAD, Spectrum, and Serverless
- Compare Athena vs Redshift vs Redshift Spectrum use cases
- Review Lake Formation: fine-grained access, LF-Tags, and governed tables
- Review DynamoDB streams, export to S3, and global tables
- Study RDS/Aurora read replicas, Multi-AZ, and data extraction patterns
- Review pipeline orchestration: Step Functions vs MWAA vs Glue workflows
- Take a data store management quiz
- Study CloudWatch monitoring for Glue jobs, EMR clusters, and Kinesis streams
- Review Glue Data Quality rules and validation strategies
- Study Athena workgroups, Redshift WLM, and query optimization
- Review QuickSight: SPICE, dashboards, and row-level security
- Review IAM roles for data services, least privilege, and cross-account access
- Study KMS encryption: SSE-S3 vs SSE-KMS, key policies, and encryption contexts
- Review Lake Formation permissions vs S3 bucket policies
- Study CloudTrail for data governance and Macie for PII detection
- Take a full 65-question timed mock exam
- Review every missed question and identify weak domains
- Re-read Glue, Kinesis, S3, Redshift, and Lake Formation cheat sheets
- Run all flashcard decks for final active recall
Study Tips
Data Ingestion is 34% of the exam — spend extra time on Glue and Kinesis.
Know when to use each Kinesis service: Streams for real-time, Firehose for delivery, Analytics for SQL.
Practice differentiating data lake (S3 + Athena) vs warehouse (Redshift) vs lakehouse (Spectrum) scenarios.
Understand Lake Formation vs IAM policies for data access control.
Ready to Practice?
Put your study plan into action with AWS Data Engineer Associate practice questions.