What changed in the dbt certification exam

How we know

We hold both editions of the official study guide — the current v1.11 and the previous V.6.0, which was written against dbt Core 1.7 — and compared their topic outlines line by line. The table below is that comparison. The guides are dbt Labs’ copyrighted documents and we do not republish them; what follows is our analysis of how the outline changed, and both guides are linked at the bottom of this page so you can check it.

The topic-by-topic diff

What this means for how you study

The removals matter more than they look. Dropping git from the outline is not a detail — a meaningful chunk of older practice material is built around branching, pull requests and the development lifecycle, and none of it can be examined now. The documentation topic went the same way, in its entirety.

The additions concentrate in two places. Model development picked up three genuinely new capabilities — microbatch, --sample and --empty — and governance picked up YAML constraints alongside the existing contract and versioning material. Unit tests joined the testing topic, and they behave differently from data tests: they run against fixtures you define, not against warehouse rows.

The expensive part of studying from prep written for the old edition is not the material that is now wrong — it is the material that is missing, because nothing tells you it is missing.

Practically: if a question pack was written before the change, the time you spend on it is split between material that is still valid, material that is no longer examinable, and a gap where the new topics should be. The gap is the expensive part, because you will not notice it.

One oddity worth knowing about

The current guide still includes a sample question about git pull, even though git was dropped from the topic outline it belongs to. dbt Labs’ own document disagrees with itself.

We treat the outline as the contract, because the guide says the subject-matter experts wrote every exam item from it — so our pack contains no git-adjacent questions. It is worth knowing the inconsistency exists, though, and if you have spare time near the end, the leftover sample question is a cheap thing to be able to answer.

Common questions

What version of dbt is the certification exam on?

The current edition of the dbt Analytics Engineering exam is built for dbt Core 1.11. The previous edition, V.6.0, was written against dbt Core 1.7.

Is old dbt certification study material still useful?

Partly, but it has two specific problems. It teaches topics that were removed — git workflow and the entire documentation topic are no longer on the outline — and it is silent on what was added, including microbatch, --sample, --empty, unit tests and YAML constraints. Material written for 1.7 is spending your time on things that cannot be asked.

What was added to the dbt certification exam in the newest version?

The microbatch materialization, --empty dry runs, --sample mode, unit tests, YAML constraints, snapshots defined in YAML, incremental-strategy selection, dbt behaviour flags, and the build, show and snapshot commands.

What was removed from the dbt certification exam?

Git functionality within the development lifecycle, the whole topic on creating and maintaining dbt documentation, converting business logic into performant SQL, distinguishing a pure SQL issue from a dbt issue, troubleshooting errors from integrated tools, combining state and result selectors, and configuring model access.