CDDP study guide

CDDP · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

The Certified Digital Data Professional (CDDP) is an independent, vendor-neutral credential for people who work with data across its lifecycle: governing it, modelling it, storing and integrating it, keeping it clean, analysing it, presenting it, securing it, and running it on modern platforms. Candidates typically come from data analyst, data engineer, data steward, BI developer, analytics consultant, and data governance roles, or are moving into those roles from adjacent IT or business positions. The CDDP study guide has 8 sections and about 3,269 words.

Data Governance and Ethics

Data Governance and Ethics is the domain that tests how an organisation assigns accountability for data and how it constrains the use of data beyond bare legal compliance. Questions probe the difference between owning and stewarding data, the hierarchy from principle to policy to standard to procedure, and the reasoning used in ethics review when a lawful use still carries foreseeable harm.

401 words, about 2 min 02

Data Architecture and Modeling

Data Architecture and Modeling tests how you translate business questions into structures that store data at the right level of abstraction. Expect questions on the conceptual-logical-physical chain, normalisation versus dimensional design, grain, keys and slowly changing dimensions, and on the architecture artifacts that let systems interoperate.

417 words, about 2 min 03

Data Storage and Integration

Data Storage and Integration tests whether you can choose and defend a storage and movement pattern: which engine, which file format, which load strategy, and how the pipeline behaves when something fails. Expect OLTP versus analytical storage, partitioning and indexing, ACID versus BASE, and the difference between ETL, ELT, CDC and streaming ingestion.

385 words, about 2 min 04

Data Quality and Master Data Management

Data Quality and Master Data Management tests two linked disciplines: measuring whether data is fit for its purpose, and maintaining a single governed version of core entities such as customer, product and supplier. Questions target quality dimensions and their measurement, root-cause correction versus cleansing, matching and survivorship rules, and the MDM implementation styles.

387 words, about 2 min 05

Data Analysis and Statistics

Data Analysis and Statistics tests whether you can reason from a sample to a claim, quantify uncertainty, and avoid the inference errors that make dashboards confidently wrong. Expect sampling and bias, hypothesis testing and p-values, confidence intervals, regression interpretation, and the classic confounders.

399 words, about 2 min 06

Data Visualization and Reporting

Data Visualization and Reporting tests whether a chart, dashboard or published report communicates a defined metric accurately to a defined audience. Questions cover encoding channels, chart selection, aggregation and denominator choices, accessibility, and the governance of distribution - who receives which number, refreshed when.

413 words, about 2 min 07

Data Security and Privacy

Data Security and Privacy tests how you protect data across its lifecycle and how you honour obligations to the people it describes. Expect classification, access control models, encryption and de-identification techniques, privacy principles and impact assessments, retention, and incident response.

405 words, about 2 min 08

Data Platforms and Emerging Technologies

Data Platforms and Emerging Technologies tests whether you can select and govern platform components - storage layers, compute engines, catalogues, pipelines and newer AI-facing services - and explain the trade-offs behind the choice. Questions target patterns such as lakehouse and data mesh, metadata and lineage, orchestration and reliability, cost control, and the governance demands of machine learning and generative AI.

462 words, about 2 min