DataX study guide

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

DataX is a vendor-neutral certification for practitioners who work across the data lifecycle rather than in a single narrow tool. It suits data engineers, analytics engineers, BI developers, data stewards, and analysts moving into a lead or architect-adjacent role, as well as graduates of data bootcamps who want a structured credential to show breadth. The DataX study guide has 8 sections and about 3,362 words.

Data Management and Governance

Data Management and Governance asks you to separate accountability from activity: who decides, who does the work, and which artefact records the decision. Exam items usually present an organisational symptom - conflicting KPI definitions, an unowned dataset, a catalogue nobody uses - and ask which governance mechanism actually fixes it.

423 words, about 2 min 02

Data Architecture and Modeling

Data Architecture and Modeling tests whether you can choose a structure that matches how the data will be queried, then defend it. Questions compare normalised and dimensional designs, ask which key a fact table should carry, or present a slowly changing dimension scenario and ask what history survives.

449 words, about 2 min 03

Data Integration and ETL/ELT

Data Integration and ETL/ELT tests whether you can move data between systems without losing, duplicating or silently corrupting it. Expect questions on full versus incremental loads, change data capture, idempotent reruns, and tool configuration - for DataX specifically: job JSON structure, parallelism and error tolerance.

440 words, about 2 min 04

Data Quality and Cleaning

Data Quality and Cleaning tests whether you can define quality objectively, measure it, and fix causes rather than symptoms. Questions ask which dimension a defect violates, how to write a testable rule, and which cleansing technique is defensible.

396 words, about 2 min 05

Data Analysis and Statistics

Data Analysis and Statistics tests whether you can describe data correctly and draw only the conclusion the evidence supports. Expect questions on choosing summary statistics, reading distributions, interpreting confidence intervals and p-values, and spotting a biased comparison.

420 words, about 2 min 06

Data Visualization and Reporting

Data Visualization and Reporting tests whether you can pick an encoding that lets a reader answer a specific question, and build reporting that stays trustworthy when definitions change. Match chart to question : change over time → line; comparison across categories → sorted horizontal bar; distribution → histogram or box plot; relationship between two measures → scatter; part-to-whole → stacked bar or treemap (pie only for two or three slices).

405 words, about 2 min 07

Data Security and Privacy

Data Security and Privacy tests whether you can protect data across its lifecycle and let people use it without re-identifying individuals. Expect questions on classification, access control, de-identification strength, and privacy principles such as purpose limitation and minimisation.

402 words, about 2 min 08

Data Platforms and Tools

Data Platforms and Tools tests whether you can explain what each layer of a modern data stack does, and choose configuration that makes queries fast and cheap without breaking correctness. Warehouse, lake, lakehouse : a warehouse stores curated schema-on-write tables on MPP compute with strong SQL and transactions; a lake stores raw files cheaply, schema-on-read; a lakehouse adds table formats - Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, Apache Hudi - bringing ACID transactions, time travel and schema evolution to object storage.

427 words, about 2 min