Databricks Generative AI Engineer Associate: 5 Exams
250 questions on RAG, Vector Search, Agent Framework, MLflow evaluation and governance, with explained answers
Are you ready to sit the Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate exam? The only honest way to find out is to be tested the way the exam tests you, before you pay the registration fee.
This practice set is 250 questions across five full-length practice exams, written to the official exam guide dated 18 March 2026. Every test carries the same domain distribution as the real exam: Design Applications, Data Preparation, Application Development, Assembling and Deploying Applications, Governance, and Evaluation and Monitoring, in the published proportions. Your score report after each attempt therefore tells you which domain to go back to, not just whether you passed.
That March 2026 revision matters more than a version bump usually does. Agent Bricks, managed and custom MCP servers, prompt version control and lifecycle management, AI Gateway tracking, custom scorers, agent monitoring, batch inference with `ai_query`, and multi-agent systems built on Genie Spaces all entered the outline in that revision. Practice material written before it simply cannot cover a large part of what the current exam asks, however well written it was.
The five tests rise in difficulty by changing how the question is put, not by reaching for more obscure facts. Test 1 is direct recall, one concept per question. Test 2 wraps the same knowledge in short practical situations and asks you to tell neighbouring services apart. Test 3 is the hinge: two options are both defensible and a single stated constraint decides between them. Test 4 goes to parameters, defaults, service limits and Unity Catalog privileges. Test 5 is a full-length timed simulation with long multi-constraint stems and domains deliberately mixed.
Every answer option has its own explanation saying why it is right or, if it is wrong, what that option actually is, because knowing the difference is what makes the distinction stick. Each question then closes with an overall explanation and a link to the official Databricks documentation page it came from.
The pass mark is 80% on the first four tests and 85% on the last. Both are set above what you need on exam day. Databricks does not publish a passing percentage for this exam, so building a margin beats aiming at a line nobody can see.
What this is not: real exam questions, a braincollection, or a replacement for hands-on work in a Databricks workspace. It is a question bank and a readiness check, and it is written to be accurate.
Groundwork: Core Concepts and Terminology
50 questions · 110 minutes · pass mark 80%
Start here, and take it cold before you study. This first test gives you a baseline across all six exam domains, in the same proportions as the real exam.
The 50 questions are direct and single-concept. What a Delta Sync index is, what a Knowledge Assistant produces, what chunk overlap buys you, which judge needs ground truth. Short stems, no multi-clause scenarios, no tricks. If you have read the exam guide once and worked through a tutorial, you should clear most of it.
The pass mark is 80%, higher than you need on exam day. That is deliberate: Databricks does not publish a passing percentage, so building a margin beats aiming at a line nobody can see.
Every answer option carries its own feedback explaining what that option actually is, plus an overall explanation linking to the official documentation. Read them even for questions you got right.
In Practice: Choosing the Right Service
50 questions · 105 minutes · pass mark 80%
Test 1 asked what things are. This one asks which one you would reach for.
Each of the 50 questions puts a short, concrete situation in front of you and asks which Databricks service, component, parameter or judge fits it. The emphasis is on telling neighbouring things apart, which is where most marks are lost on the real exam: Knowledge Assistant against Information Extraction, a retriever against a retriever tool, a fixed-size splitter against a paragraph-based one, RetrievalRelevance against RelevanceToQuery, an input guardrail against an output guardrail.
The domain mix and the underlying facts are the same as in test 1. Only the framing has changed, so a drop in your score here tells you something specific: you know the definitions but not yet the boundaries between them.
Two questions share an almost identical opening with another question and differ in one requirement. Read every stem to the end.
Trade-offs: Constraint-Driven Decisions
50 questions · 100 minutes · pass mark 80%
This is the hinge of this practice set, and the test that most closely resembles how the real exam thinks.
In each of the 50 questions, two options are genuinely defensible designs. A single constraint stated in the stem decides between them: a latency target, a cost ceiling, whether ground truth exists, whether the source data is structured or unstructured, whether an answer must be blocked rather than merely measured, whether a corpus is licensed for the use.
If you know the definitions but not the trade-off, you will pick the wrong one. That is the point. The feedback on each wrong-but-defensible option tells you the condition under which it would have been right, which is the part worth remembering.
Expect recall against precision, continuous against triggered synchronisation, automatic authentication against acting on behalf of the user, guardrails against scorers, and metadata filtering against re-ranking.
Under the Hood: Parameters, Limits, Privileges
50 questions · 95 minutes · pass mark 80%
Test 3 asked which design a constraint selects. This one asks what you actually type and what the platform actually does.
These 50 questions cover exact parameter names and defaults, function arguments and return shapes, service limits, required Unity Catalog privileges, and the order operations have to happen in. Which parameter pair you supply for managed as against self-managed embeddings. What ai_query returns once failOnError is set to false. Which privileges registering a model needs, and how they differ from registering a prompt. Whether pageRange counts from zero or from one.
Every value tested here comes from official Databricks documentation. Where Databricks' own pages contradict each other, or a figure is preview-only and likely to move, the question was left out rather than guessed at.
This is the most mechanical test in the set, and the one worth revisiting the day before you sit the exam.
Exam Day: Full-Length Timed Simulation
50 questions · 90 minutes · pass mark 85%
Save this one. Take it in a single uninterrupted sitting, once you have worked through the first four.
The stems are the longest in this practice set: three to five sentences of realistic situation, usually with two constraints to satisfy at once, and domains deliberately mixed inside a single question. A data preparation decision may turn on a deployment limit; an evaluation question may turn on whether ground truth can exist in production at all. No new facts appear here. The difficulty is in the reading.
You get 90 minutes, the real exam's time limit, for 50 questions rather than the 45 you will face. The pass mark is 85%. Both are tighter than the real thing on purpose: this is a readiness gate, not a prediction. Clear it comfortably and you are ready to book.
If you fall short, go to your weakest domain, reread the explanations, and come back in a few days.
What you will practice
- Test yourself against 250 questions built to the official exam guide dated 18 March 2026, in the real domain proportions.
- Tell apart the services candidates most often confuse: Agent Bricks components, index types, guardrails and scorers.
- Read a scenario and work out which constraint decides the design, which is how the exam actually asks.
- Recall the parameters, defaults, limits and Unity Catalog privileges that the implementation questions turn on.
- Understand every answer you get wrong through per-option feedback and a linked official documentation source.
- Finish with a full-length timed simulation that tells you whether you are ready to book the exam.
- Diagnose your weak domains from the per-domain score report after every attempt.
- Practise the multiple-response questions that the exam guide confirms you will meet on the day.
Exam domains covered
Who is this for
Data engineers, machine learning engineers, software developers, solution architects and platform engineers who are preparing for the Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate exam and want to know where they stand before paying the registration fee. Also for students and career switchers moving into AI engineering who have studied the material but have never been tested on it under time pressure, and for data analysts, technical product managers and consultants who work alongside a generative AI team on Databricks and need the same vocabulary.
Note on exam versions. Databricks revised this exam guide in March 2026, and the revision was substantial: Agent Bricks, MCP servers, prompt version control and lifecycle management, AI Gateway tracking, custom scorers, agent monitoring, batch inference with `ai_query`, and multi-agent systems using Genie Spaces all entered the outline. Practice material written before that date cannot cover roughly a third of what you will be asked. Every question here is written to the current guide.
What this is: a question bank with thorough explanations and a realistic readiness check. What it is not: the real exam questions, a braincollection, or a substitute for hands-on work in a workspace. Nobody can sell you the actual exam items, and anyone claiming to is selling you a problem.
Requirements
- No prior Databricks certification is needed. Some hands-on time in a Databricks workspace will make the explanations land faster, but you can start from the study guide.
- The exam profile assumes you can read Python and are comfortable with the idea of SDKs and REST APIs. You will not be asked to write code here, but code and function signatures appear in the questions.
- These are practice exams, not a course. They test and explain; they do not teach the platform from scratch. Use them alongside the free official Databricks learning material, not instead of it.
Free exam guide
Not sure what to expect? Read how the exam is built, what it covers and how to prepare.