About This Study Plan
This 90-day study plan breaks the PDE (Data Engineer) exam preparation into 3 focused study sessions with 12 actionable tasks. The plan covers all 5 exam domains — Designing Data Processing Systems, Ingesting and Processing Data, Storing and Managing Data, Preparing Data for Analysis, Automating Data Workloads — ensuring complete coverage. Comprehensive 90-day plan for the Google Professional Data Engineer exam.
Prerequisites
- Basic SQL knowledge
- 1–2 hours per day
Study Schedule
- Weeks 1–2: SQL review and BigQuery basics
- Week 3: Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, and database fundamentals
- Week 4: Pub/Sub basics and simple data pipelines
- End of month: Comfortable with core data services
- Week 5: Dataflow and Apache Beam programming model
- Week 6: Dataproc, Spark basics, and batch processing
- Week 7: Streaming pipelines — windowing, watermarks, triggers
- Week 8: Orchestration with Cloud Composer and Data Fusion
- Week 9: BigQuery ML, analytics, and data governance
- Week 10: Security, encryption, and compliance
- Week 11: Practice exam #1 + review
- Week 12: Practice exam #2, scenario drills, and final prep
Study Tips
The PDE exam is very practical — hands-on lab time is essential.
Build a streaming pipeline with Pub/Sub → Dataflow → BigQuery.
Know the tradeoffs between cost, latency, and consistency for each service.
Recommended Google Cloud Study Resources
Supplement this study plan with Google Cloud Skills Boost, which provides structured learning paths aligned to each certification. The Google Cloud documentation is exceptionally detailed and frequently referenced in exam questions. Take advantage of the free $300 credit for new GCP accounts to build real projects during your study period.
Ready to Practice?
Put your study plan into action with Data Engineer practice questions.