DEA-C01 deep review — September 28, 2026

Read the complete guide and all 120 numbered skills across 17 tasks, root, revision history, in-scope and credential pages. Version 1.1 dated December 12, 2025 remains the baseline; broad objectives match the accepted snapshot. No new exam retirement/change was found. AWS SCT remains a detailed task example despite removal from the non-exhaustive service list; explain the distinction.

Learner updates

Add 40 answer explanations and five original worked cases for join grain, idempotent replay, NULL averages, scan costs and completeness. Ten local SQLite/arithmetic assertions passed. Fill driver connectivity, state recovery, APIs, graph/tree concepts, Lambda mounts, database locks and schema-conversion validation. SQLite checks demonstrate general concepts, not AWS engine execution.

Explain Glue bookmark resets without target cleanup; distinguish Iceberg format, S3 Tables maintenance and engine/catalog compatibility. The September 2 Trino article contributes architecture/prerequisite context only; no infrastructure was deployed.

Lifecycle and resource checks

CloudTrail Lake closed to new customers May 31, 2026 while remaining in task 4.4.3. Explain organization/account EDS expansion and preserve the distinction from supported CloudTrail trails. Record Discovery Service, Snowball Edge and Kendra new-customer boundaries without treating the exam as retired.

Redshift's behavior notices end Python UDF support after June 30 with phased enforcement, extend ODBC 1.x support to December 31, and set the TLS 1.2 minimum for TLS connections from October 31. Explain patch-202 Lake Formation mutation permissions and its S3 Tables exception. Do not infer that the TLS notice forces encryption on currently unencrypted connections.

Pluralsight confirms 17h/six courses/one lab; Coursera exposes 11 modules/10 assignments; LinkedIn exposes a public outline/intro; Tutorials Dojo lists course/lab/practice metadata. No paid lessons were verified. Qualify O'Reilly/Udemy blocks, Whizlabs/Skill Builder shells and unverified video runtime; explicitly avoid recalled-question marketing.

Eight labs remain proposed. No AWS queries, migrations, live models or paid lessons were executed. Independent human review remains pending. The operational receipt records objective hashes, mapping, fetches and repository/site validation. Accepted snapshots were preserved.