DABCC study guide
DABCC · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
DABCC is a vendor-neutral certification aimed at data management professionals who want to demonstrate breadth across the full data lifecycle rather than depth in a single tool. It suits data stewards, data architects, ETL and integration developers, data quality analysts, BI and reporting specialists, and data security or privacy officers who already work with data platforms and need a credential that maps to recognised practice areas. The DABCC study guide has 7 sections and about 2,938 words.
01Data Governance and Stewardship
The exam tests whether you can design decision rights, accountability and policy enforcement around data, not whether you can recite a definition. Expect scenarios on operating models, owner/steward/custodian roles, escalation through governance bodies, and outcome-based metrics.
450 words, about 2 min02Data Architecture and Modeling
Can you choose a model, declare a grain, and justify keys and history? Scenarios ask you to critique a schema, select a pattern, or explain why a report double-counts.
452 words, about 2 min03Data Integration and ETL
Can you design a load that is still correct on day 100? Scenarios target incremental logic, idempotency, late-arriving data, delete handling and reconciliation.
406 words, about 2 min04Data Quality Management
Can you define, measure and remediate quality with business owners rather than run a one-off cleanse? Expect questions on dimensions, thresholds, root cause and issue management.
397 words, about 2 min05Data Security and Privacy
Can you turn classification and privacy obligations into engineering decisions: what data, whose purpose, which control? Scenarios test access models, masking choices, retention and data subject rights.
408 words, about 2 min06Analytics and Reporting
Questions target metric definition, aggregation correctness, semantic layers, join traps and dashboard trust. You are expected to diagnose why two reports disagree.
403 words, about 2 min07Metadata and Master Data Management
Can you make data findable and produce one trusted version of core entities? Expect questions on metadata types, lineage, glossary versus dictionary, MDM styles, matching and survivorship.
422 words, about 2 min