Azure Data Engineer Certification (DP-203) Guide
Exam DP-203 and the Azure Data Engineer Associate certification were retired on 31 March 2025. This guide explains what that means for people who hold it or were studying for it, what the exam covered, how the Fabric Data Engineer Associate exam DP-700 differs, and how to plan your preparation now.
GloryTecks Team
Training & Placement Faculty
Last updated: 2 October 2026
If you are reading a study plan for DP-203, stop and check its date. Microsoft retired exam DP-203 and the certification it led to, Azure Data Engineer Associate, on 31 March 2025. The exam can no longer be booked. A great deal of advice on the internet has not caught up, so this guide starts with the facts and then covers what to do instead.
The facts
Microsoft's certification page for Azure Data Engineer Associate shows a retirement date of 31 March 2025 and carries a warning: this certification and the renewal assessment are retired (Microsoft Learn: Azure Data Engineer Associate). The study guide says the same of the exam, to the minute (Microsoft Learn: DP-203 study guide).
That means three things:
- You cannot take DP-203. No booking, no new certificates.
- You cannot renew it. The renewal assessment was retired with it.
- Course and book material aimed at the exam is now historical. The technology it teaches is not.
If you already hold it
Microsoft's retirement policy answers this directly. A certification earned or renewed before it was retired stays in the Active Certifications section of your transcript until it expires. After that it moves to the Historical Certifications section (Microsoft Learn: credential retirement).
So the credential is not erased. It remains on your record as something you earned. Because associate certifications last a year unless renewed, and this one can no longer be renewed, it will become historical when its current term ends. On a CV, list it with the year you earned it. It shows you learned Azure data engineering; it simply cannot be kept current.
What DP-203 covered
The outline is still worth reading, because it is a compact description of Azure data engineering work. The last version, dated October 2024, had three areas:
| Skill area | Weight | Included |
|---|---|---|
| Design and implement data storage | 15 to 20% | Partition strategies for files, analytical and streaming workloads; the data exploration layer with serverless SQL and Spark |
| Develop data processing | 40 to 45% | Incremental loads, Spark and T-SQL transformations, pipelines in Data Factory or Synapse, batch and stream processing, Delta Lake, handling duplicates and late data |
| Secure, monitor and optimize | 30 to 35% | Role-based access control, access control lists, masking and encryption, monitoring pipelines, tuning |
The services named throughout were Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, Azure Stream Analytics and Event Hubs.
What replaced it
Microsoft's current data engineering certification is Fabric Data Engineer Associate, earned by passing exam DP-700 (Microsoft Learn: Fabric Data Engineer Associate).
Its three skill areas are weighted equally (Microsoft Learn: DP-700 study guide):
| Skill area | Weight | Included |
|---|---|---|
| Implement and manage an analytics solution | 30 to 35% | Workspace settings, version control and deployment pipelines, access controls, sensitivity labels, orchestration with pipelines and notebooks |
| Ingest and transform data | 30 to 35% | Full and incremental loads, dimensional models, Dataflows Gen2, notebooks, PySpark, SQL and KQL, shortcuts and mirroring, streaming with Eventstream and Spark |
| Monitor and optimize an analytics solution | 30 to 35% | Monitoring ingestion and transformation, resolving pipeline, dataflow and notebook errors, optimizing lakehouse tables, warehouses and Spark |
The exam page lists SQL, PySpark and Kusto Query Language as the languages a candidate should be skilled in.
Exam facts, from the same pages:
- Duration: 100 minutes.
- Passing score: 700 on a scale of 1 to 1,000. The score is scaled, and Microsoft notes that it may not equal 70% of the points (Microsoft Learn: exam scoring).
- Price: depends on the country or region where the exam is proctored. Check the exam page for the current figure.
- Validity: one year, renewable at no cost by passing an online assessment in the six months before expiry (Microsoft Learn: certification renewal).
- Microsoft Learn during the exam. Associate-level exams allow access to Microsoft Learn while you answer, with no extra time added (Microsoft Learn: exam duration and experience).
- Retakes: 24 hours after a first failed attempt, then 14 days between attempts, and no more than five attempts in 12 months (Microsoft Learn: retake policy).
The skills outline is revised periodically. Microsoft's page says the English version of the exam is being updated on 19 October 2026, and the outline above is the one published for that date, so read the live study guide before you book.
DP-203 and DP-700 compared
| DP-203 | DP-700 | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Retired 31 March 2025 | Current |
| Platform | Azure services assembled by you | Microsoft Fabric |
| Storage | Data Lake Storage Gen2, Synapse SQL pools | OneLake, lakehouses, warehouses |
| Pipelines | Data Factory and Synapse pipelines | Fabric pipelines, Dataflows Gen2 |
| Spark | Azure Databricks, Synapse Spark | Fabric notebooks and Spark |
| Streaming | Stream Analytics, Event Hubs | Eventstream, Spark structured streaming, KQL |
| Languages | SQL, Python, Scala | SQL, PySpark, KQL |
| Security focus | RBAC, ACLs, masking, encryption | Workspace and item access, OneLake security, labels |
What transfers
More than the change of platform suggests. These ideas appear in both outlines, almost word for word:
- Full and incremental loads.
- Transforming data with Spark and with SQL.
- Handling duplicate, missing and late-arriving data.
- Orchestrating with pipelines, parameters and schedules.
- Dimensional modelling.
- Monitoring, error handling and performance tuning.
What is new is the platform layer: Fabric workspaces, OneLake and shortcuts, Dataflows Gen2, Eventstream, KQL, and Fabric's deployment pipelines. If you studied for DP-203, the concepts are already yours; the product names and tools are what you add. Microsoft Fabric vs Azure Data Factory maps one to the other for pipelines.
Should you still learn Data Factory, Synapse and Databricks?
A certification retiring is not a technology retiring. Azure Data Factory, Synapse and Databricks are in production in a great many organisations, and job descriptions follow the systems employers actually run, not the exam catalogue. Learn them if the roles you are aiming for use them. The Azure Data Factory roadmap sets out a sequence.
What has changed is the proof. There is no longer a Microsoft exam that certifies that particular stack. The evidence you can show is a portfolio: working pipelines, documented, on real data. For many interviewers that was always the stronger evidence.
Other certifications worth knowing
- Azure Fundamentals, AZ-900. A beginner-level exam on cloud concepts and core Azure services. Fundamentals certifications do not expire. See the AZ-900 quick start.
- Azure Data Fundamentals, DP-900. Core data concepts, relational and non-relational data on Azure, and analytics workloads, at fundamentals level (Microsoft Learn: DP-900 study guide).
- Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate, DP-600. Focused on preparing data and on semantic models, for those closer to analytics and reporting than to pipelines (Microsoft Learn: DP-600 study guide).
Outside Microsoft, cloud-specific data engineering exams exist on other platforms; the AWS Certified Data Engineer exam guide covers one.
A preparation plan for DP-700
- Read the study guide first, every line of the skills outline. It is the syllabus.
- Get hands-on access. Microsoft offers a Fabric trial. Work in a real workspace; this exam assumes you have built things.
- Build one end-to-end project: ingest files with a pipeline, land them in a lakehouse, transform with a notebook in PySpark, load a warehouse table incrementally, schedule it, and break it on purpose to practise finding the error. Incremental data loading and Apache Spark explained cover two of the underlying skills.
- Learn enough KQL to read and write basic queries. It is the language least likely to be familiar.
- Take Microsoft's free practice assessment from the exam page, and use the exam sandbox to see the interface.
- Book when the practice results are steady, not before.
What a certification does and does not do
It shows that you covered a defined syllabus and passed a proctored exam. That helps a CV past a first filter and gives structure to self-study. It does not show that you can design a pipeline that survives bad data, and it is not a promise of a job. Treat it as one piece of evidence beside projects you can explain.
Can I still take the DP-203 exam?
Is my DP-203 certification still valid?
What replaced DP-203?
Is DP-203 study material still useful?
Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse and Azure Databricks are covered in the Data Engineering course.
Sources
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Engineer Associate (Microsoft Learn) — Microsoft Learn
- Study guide for Exam DP-203: Data Engineering on Microsoft Azure (Microsoft Learn) — Microsoft Learn
- Credential retirement (Microsoft Learn) — Microsoft Learn
- Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate (Microsoft Learn) — Microsoft Learn
- Study guide for Exam DP-700: Implementing Data Engineering Solutions Using Microsoft Fabric (Microsoft Learn) — Microsoft Learn
- Study guide for Exam DP-900: Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals (Microsoft Learn) — Microsoft Learn
- Study guide for Exam DP-600: Implementing Analytics Solutions Using Microsoft Fabric (Microsoft Learn) — Microsoft Learn
- Microsoft Certification Renewal (Microsoft Learn) — Microsoft Learn
- Exam duration and exam experience (Microsoft Learn) — Microsoft Learn
- Exam and Applied Skills assessment lab retake policies (Microsoft Learn) — Microsoft Learn
- Exam scoring and score reports (Microsoft Learn) — Microsoft Learn
GloryTecks Team
Training & Placement Faculty
The GloryTecks faculty team mentors learners across Data Science, AI and Data Engineering, with a focus on real-time projects and placement readiness in Hyderabad.
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