AWS Database Specialty
Amazon Web Services
Complete guide to passing the AWS Database Specialty exam on your first attempt.
$300
~50%
3 years
Global
Amazon Web Services
$130k-$175k
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Complete Overview
AWS Certified Database - Specialty, exam code DBS-C01, was a specialty-level certification from Amazon Web Services covering the design, migration, deployment, management, monitoring and security of databases on AWS. Amazon retired it on April 30, 2024, and the last day anyone could sit the exam was April 29, 2024, so the 300 USD exam fee is no longer payable and no new candidate can earn the credential. Anyone reading this page who wants the equivalent qualification today should look at AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate, which costs 150 USD and runs 130 minutes.
AWS announced the retirement in a Training and Certification blog post published January 30, 2024, which also retired AWS Certified Data Analytics - Specialty and AWS Certified: SAP on AWS - Specialty. The stated reason was a decision to reduce the number of specialty certifications and strengthen the foundational, associate and professional tiers instead. AWS launched AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate on March 12, 2024 as part of the same restructuring. Exam prep material for DBS-C01 on AWS Skill Builder, including the Official Practice Question Set, Official Practice Exam and Exam Prep course, was withdrawn on April 29, 2024.
If you already hold the certification, it remains active for three years from the date you earned it, and your Credly digital badge continues to display. There is no recertification route: AWS stated that after the retirement date the exam would no longer be offered, so holders whose credential expires simply lose active status. The last people whose credentials remain valid earned them on April 29, 2024, meaning the final active DBS-C01 certifications expire in April 2027.
While it ran, DBS-C01 was 180 minutes long and contained 65 questions, of which 50 were scored and 15 were unscored pretest items. It was delivered at Pearson VUE test centres or by online proctoring, in English, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. Results were reported on a scaled range of 100 to 1,000 with a minimum passing score of 750, using a compensatory model that did not require a pass in each domain. AWS never published a pass rate for it.
The blueprint covered five domains: Workload-Specific Database Design at 26 percent, Deployment and Migration at 20 percent, and Management and Operations, Monitoring and Troubleshooting and Database Security at 18 percent each. AWS described the target candidate as having at least five years of experience with common database technologies and at least two years of hands-on AWS experience. That blueprint remains a useful map of AWS database skills even though the exam behind it is gone, which is why the domain breakdown is preserved below.
Why Get AWS Database Specialty Certified?
The exam is retired and cannot be taken. AWS stopped offering DBS-C01 after April 29, 2024, so treat everything below as reference material rather than a live certification target.
AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate is the certification AWS launched in the same restructuring, on March 12, 2024. It costs 150 USD instead of 300 USD, runs 130 minutes with 65 questions, and requires a scaled score of 720 rather than 750.
Holders keep an active credential for three years from the date they earned it, and the Credly digital badge remains displayable, so an existing DBS-C01 certification is still worth listing on a profile until it expires.
The DBS-C01 blueprint remains AWS's most detailed public map of the database skills it expected at specialty level, covering Aurora, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, Neptune, Keyspaces, Timestream, ElastiCache, RDS and Redshift in one document.
AWS names AWS Certified Security - Specialty as a recommended next step for cloud data professionals, and that exam remains live at 300 USD with a three-year validity.
AWS continues to publish free and paid database training on AWS Skill Builder, including learning plans for specific database solutions, even though the DBS-C01 exam prep material was withdrawn.
Anyone whose DBS-C01 credential is approaching its three-year expiry has no recertification path for it, which makes planning a replacement exam a dated task rather than an open-ended one.
Exam Format & Structure
Duration
180 minutes, when the exam was offered. The exam retired on April 30, 2024 and can no longer be taken.
Questions
65 questions, of which 50 were scored and 15 were unscored pretest items that were not identified during the exam
Passing Score
750 on a scaled range of 100 to 1,000, using a compensatory model that did not require a passing score in each domain
Question Types
- Multiple choice with one correct response and three distractors
- Multiple response with two or more correct responses out of five or more options
Delivery Method
Pearson VUE test centre or online proctored exam, until the April 29, 2024 final testing date
Exam Domains & Topics
The heaviest domain. It covered selecting the right database service for a given data shape and workload, designing for disaster recovery and high availability, designing for performance, compliance and scalability, and comparing the cost of competing database solutions. Questions typically named a workload and asked which AWS database service fitted it best.
Key Topics to Master:
- ACID compared with BASE workloads and when each applies
- Relational, key-value, document, in-memory, graph, time series and ledger database use cases
- Read replicas compared with Multi-AZ deployments for availability and for read scaling
- Serverless compared with instance-based database architecture
- Partitioning, sharding and indexing implications on throughput and cost
- DynamoDB adaptive capacity and hot partition behaviour
- DynamoDB on-demand compared with provisioned capacity cost modelling
- Database caching with Amazon ElastiCache and DynamoDB Accelerator
- Data locality driven by compliance and residency requirements
Covered automating database deployments with tools such as AWS CloudFormation and the AWS CLI, choosing a data preparation and migration strategy, and running and validating the migration itself. The distinction between homogeneous and heterogeneous migration drove many answers, because it determines whether the AWS Schema Conversion Tool is needed alongside AWS DMS.
Key Topics to Master:
- AWS Database Migration Service full load, CDC and full load plus CDC modes
- AWS Schema Conversion Tool for heterogeneous engine changes
- Homogeneous compared with heterogeneous migration strategy selection
- Snapshot, replication and restore as alternative migration methods
- Native engine tools such as mysqldump and pg_dump compared with AWS DMS
- CloudFormation templates for repeatable database deployment
- Preparing source and target endpoints, including network reachability and permissions
- Validating a completed load and reconciling row counts
Covered maintenance tasks and processes, backup and restore strategy, and managing the operational environment of a database solution. The shared responsibility model was explicitly named in the exam guide, because the boundary shifts between Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora and a self-managed database on Amazon EC2.
Key Topics to Master:
- The AWS shared responsibility model applied to managed database services
- Maintenance windows and the difference between major and minor engine upgrades
- Automated backups compared with manual snapshots, and point-in-time recovery
- Cross-Region and encrypted backup copies
- Retention policies mapped to recovery point objective and recovery time objective
- RDS parameter groups and option groups, and DynamoDB index changes
- Refreshing lower environments from production data
- Acting on AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations
Covered monitoring and alerting strategy, resolving common database failures, and optimising database performance. The distinction between Amazon CloudWatch metrics, Amazon RDS Performance Insights and native engine diagnostics decided many answers, since each surfaces a different layer of the problem.
Key Topics to Master:
- Amazon CloudWatch metrics and alarms for RDS, Aurora and DynamoDB
- Amazon RDS Performance Insights and database load by wait event
- Enhanced Monitoring for operating-system-level metrics
- Alert delivery through Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS, and CloudWatch dashboards
- Troubleshooting connectivity, storage exhaustion and partitioning failures
- DynamoDB throttling diagnosis and CloudWatch consumed capacity metrics
- Query, schema and index tuning for relational engines
- Automating responses to recurring failure categories
Covered encryption at rest and in transit, auditing solutions, access control and authentication mechanisms, and recognising security vulnerabilities in a database design. Auditing was broken out by target: schema changes, data changes, data access, and infrastructure changes each needed a different mechanism.
Key Topics to Master:
- Encryption at rest for relational and NoSQL engines using AWS KMS and AWS CloudHSM
- SSL and TLS connectivity enforcement to database endpoints
- Key management, rotation and cross-account key access
- Auditing DDL, DML and query access, and exporting database logs to CloudWatch Logs
- AWS CloudTrail for infrastructure-level change auditing
- IAM database authentication compared with native credentials and Active Directory
- Security group rules and network ACLs controlling database reachability
- VPC endpoints, public compared with private subnet placement, and perimeter design
- Storing sensitive data appropriately, including AWS Secrets Manager for credentials
Recommended Study Plan
- 1Confirm that DBS-C01 is retired by reading the AWS Training and Certification blog post published January 30, 2024
- 2Download the AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate exam guide from the AWS certification page and compare its domains with the DBS-C01 domains preserved below
- 3Check your AWS Certification Account under Exam History if you already hold DBS-C01, and note the exact three-year expiry date
- 4Decide between AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate at 150 USD and AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate at 150 USD based on the job you want
- 5Take the free AWS Certification Official Practice Question Set for your chosen live exam to set a baseline
- 1Read the Amazon RDS User Guide sections on Multi-AZ deployments, read replicas and automated backups
- 2Launch an Aurora MySQL cluster with a reader endpoint and observe failover behaviour by triggering a failover manually
- 3Compare an Aurora cluster volume with RDS storage in the Aurora User Guide storage and reliability section
- 4Configure parameter groups and option groups on an RDS instance and note which parameters require a reboot
- 5Enable Performance Insights and generate load, then read the database load chart by wait event
- 1Work through the DynamoDB Developer Guide chapter on best practices for designing partition keys
- 2Build a single table with a global secondary index and a local secondary index and query both
- 3Switch a table between on-demand and provisioned capacity and compare the CloudWatch consumed capacity metrics
- 4Deliberately create a hot partition, observe throttling, and read how adaptive capacity responds
- 5Put DynamoDB Accelerator in front of the table and measure the latency difference
- 1Read the service overview pages for Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon Neptune, Amazon Keyspaces, Amazon Timestream and Amazon QLDB
- 2Write a one-paragraph rule for each engine stating the workload shape that makes it the right answer
- 3Deploy an ElastiCache for Redis cluster and implement a cache-aside pattern against an RDS instance
- 4Load a small graph into Neptune and run a Gremlin traversal to see what graph queries actually look like
- 5Compare Amazon Redshift with Aurora for an analytical query on the same dataset
- 1Read the AWS Database Migration Service User Guide sections on full load, change data capture, and task settings
- 2Run a homogeneous migration from a source MySQL instance to Amazon RDS for MySQL using AWS DMS
- 3Run a heterogeneous migration using AWS SCT to convert an Oracle or SQL Server schema to PostgreSQL
- 4Break the migration on purpose with an unreachable endpoint and read the DMS task logs to diagnose it
- 5Validate a completed load with the AWS DMS data validation feature and reconcile the results
- 1Perform a point-in-time restore of an RDS instance and note the new endpoint that results
- 2Copy an encrypted snapshot to a second Region and work through the KMS key requirements
- 3Configure DynamoDB point-in-time recovery and on-demand backups, then restore to a new table
- 4Set up AWS Backup with a backup plan covering RDS and DynamoDB and apply a retention rule
- 5Write recovery point objective and recovery time objective figures for each approach you tested
- 1Enable IAM database authentication on an RDS PostgreSQL instance and connect using a generated auth token
- 2Enforce TLS by setting rds.force_ssl and confirm that a plaintext connection is refused
- 3Create a customer managed KMS key, encrypt a new RDS instance with it, and test cross-account snapshot sharing
- 4Enable database audit logging and export it to CloudWatch Logs, then query it with Logs Insights
- 5Store a database credential in AWS Secrets Manager with automatic rotation and update an application to read it
- 1Build a CloudWatch dashboard covering CPU, freeable memory, storage, connections and replica lag for one RDS instance
- 2Create alarms with SNS notification for storage below a threshold and replica lag above a threshold
- 3Diagnose a slow query using Performance Insights, then fix it with an index and measure the change
- 4Model the monthly cost of the same workload on Aurora, RDS and DynamoDB using the AWS Pricing Calculator
- 5Review AWS Trusted Advisor checks relating to idle and underutilised database instances
- 1Read the AWS Glue Developer Guide sections on crawlers, the Data Catalog and ETL jobs
- 2Build a small pipeline that lands data in Amazon S3, catalogues it with Glue and queries it with Amazon Athena
- 3Read about Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon Data Firehose for streaming ingestion
- 4Work through data quality and lineage concepts in the Data Engineer - Associate exam guide
- 5Take the AWS Certification Official Practice Question Set for Data Engineer - Associate again and compare with your week one baseline
- 1Take the AWS Certification Official Pretest for your chosen live exam under timed conditions
- 2Rebuild each missed question into a single sentence stating why the correct service won
- 3Review the list of AWS service short names available through the Help button during the exam
- 4Re-read the appendix of your chosen exam guide and delete out-of-scope services from revision
- 5Book the exam and claim the 50 percent discount voucher in your AWS Certification Account if you already hold an AWS certification
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Best Study Resources
AWS Certification retirements and launches
Official announcementThe AWS Training and Certification blog post of January 30, 2024 that announced the retirement of Database - Specialty, Data Analytics - Specialty and SAP on AWS - Specialty, and the launch of Data Engineer - Associate.
Free
AWS Certified Database - Specialty (DBS-C01) Exam Guide, version 2.2
Archived exam blueprintThe final published blueprint, dated August 2023. It remains the clearest statement of the five domains, their weightings, and the in-scope and out-of-scope AWS services for database work.
Free
AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate
Live replacement certificationThe certification AWS launched on March 12, 2024 in the same restructuring. It runs 130 minutes with 65 questions, is offered in English, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese, and is valid for three years.
150 USD
Amazon DynamoDB Developer Guide
Official documentationThe best practices chapters on partition key design, secondary indexes and query patterns cover most of what the Workload-Specific Database Design domain asked about NoSQL.
Free
Amazon Aurora User Guide
Official documentationCovers the cluster volume architecture, reader endpoints, failover behaviour, Aurora Global Database and Aurora Serverless, all of which sat inside the design and high availability tasks.
Free
AWS Database Migration Service User Guide
Official documentationThe reference for the Deployment and Migration domain, covering full load, change data capture, task settings, endpoint configuration and data validation.
Free
AWS Skill Builder database learning plans
Digital trainingAWS confirmed it would continue offering free and paid database training on Skill Builder after the certification retired, including learning plans for specific types of database solutions.
Free tier plus Individual subscription at 29 USD per month or 449 USD per year
AWS Builder Labs
Hands-on labsProvisioned environments for practising RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB and DMS tasks without running up charges in your own account. Labs typically cost up to 15 credits when purchased individually.
Included with an AWS Skill Builder Individual subscription, or paid with credits at 1 USD per credit
Credly
Badge platformAWS confirmed that holders of the retired specialty certifications can continue to display their digital badge from Credly after the retirement date, for as long as the credential remains within its three-year validity.
Free
AWS Certification Account
Candidate portalWhere you check the exact expiry date of an existing DBS-C01 credential under Exam History, and where the 50 percent discount voucher toward your next AWS exam appears.
Free
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Booking or paying for a DBS-C01 exam attempt through a third-party voucher seller that has not updated its catalogue.
Verify against the AWS certification site before buying anything. AWS stopped delivering DBS-C01 after April 29, 2024, so no legitimate voucher can be redeemed for it. Vouchers you already hold can be applied to a live exam instead, subject to their expiry date, which AWS does not extend.
Assuming an existing DBS-C01 credential can be renewed by retaking the exam, the way AWS certifications normally work.
There is no recertification path. AWS stated in the retirement announcement that recertification would not be possible after the retirement dates because the exams would no longer be offered. Plan a different exam before your three-year expiry rather than budgeting for a retake that cannot be booked.
Buying a DBS-C01 course or practice question bank in 2026 because search results still rank them highly.
Check the exam code and the last-updated date on any paid material. Several training platforms still list DBS-C01 courses with a retired label attached in small print. If you want a live credential, the money is better spent on Data Engineer - Associate material, which AWS priced its own prep for on Skill Builder.
Treating AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate as a straight renaming of Database - Specialty and studying only database services for it.
Read both exam guides side by side. Data Engineer - Associate shifts weight toward ingestion, transformation, pipeline orchestration, data modelling, lifecycle management and data quality, which pulls in AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, Amazon Kinesis and Amazon EMR. The DBS-C01 depth on RDS parameter groups, option groups and engine upgrades is not what the associate exam is built around.
Letting the credential lapse quietly and only noticing after it has expired.
Look up the exact date in your AWS Certification Account under Exam History. The final possible DBS-C01 expiry is in April 2027, three years after the last test date of April 29, 2024. Set a calendar reminder six months before yours so you can pass a replacement exam while the badge is still active on your profile.
Studying the DBS-C01 blueprint from memory of the older version 2.x guides and missing the final domain weightings.
Use version 2.2 of the exam guide, dated August 2023, which is the final published version. It sets Workload-Specific Database Design at 26 percent, Deployment and Migration at 20 percent, and Management and Operations, Monitoring and Troubleshooting and Database Security at 18 percent each.
Assuming the DBS-C01 material covered data lakes, ETL pipelines and complex stored procedures.
The exam guide explicitly listed developing ETL operations, designing data pipelines, designing data lake architectures and developing complex stored procedures as out of scope for the target candidate. Anyone using the old blueprint as a skills map today should add those topics separately, because modern data engineering roles expect them.
Listing the credential on a CV without a date, so a reader cannot tell whether it is still active.
Write it with the earned date and expiry, for example earned March 2024 and valid to March 2027, and link the Credly badge. Recruiters who follow AWS certification news know the exam retired, and an undated entry reads as though it might already have lapsed.
Exam Day Tips
- 1
There is no exam day. AWS Certified Database - Specialty retired on April 30, 2024 and Pearson VUE stopped delivering it after April 29, 2024, so no appointment can be scheduled at a test centre or online.
- 2
If you are sitting AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate instead, budget 130 minutes for 65 questions, roughly two minutes each, and aim for the 720 scaled score required at associate level rather than the 750 that specialty exams used.
- 3
Identification requirements differ by delivery method and are the same for every AWS exam. A test centre appointment needs two primary IDs, or one primary and one secondary; an online proctored appointment needs a single primary ID. A primary ID must be an original, unexpired, government-issued document with your photo, your signature and your name in Roman characters, matching your AWS Certification Account exactly.
- 4
No calculator, scratch paper or reference material is permitted in any AWS Certification exam. The only in-exam reference is the list of AWS service short names opened through the Help button.
- 5
Request the ESL +30 accommodation before registering if English is not your first language and you are testing in English. It adds 30 minutes and only needs requesting once for all future AWS exams.
- 6
For an online proctored appointment, run the OnVUE system test in advance, clear the desk entirely, and expect to show all four walls of the room on camera before the exam unlocks.
- 7
You can reschedule an AWS exam up to 24 hours before the appointment, and only twice per registration; a third change means cancelling and rebooking.
- 8
Never leave a question blank. Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect and AWS applies no penalty for guessing.
- 9
Final results post to your AWS Certification Account within five business days, with a downloadable PDF score report under Exam History rather than a printed result at the test centre.
Career Paths & Salary Ranges
Cloud database engineer
Runs RDS, Aurora and DynamoDB fleets in production: sizing instances, managing engine upgrades and maintenance windows, tuning parameter groups, and owning backup and restore against defined recovery objectives.
$130k-$175k
Data engineer
The role AWS designed the replacement certification around. Builds ingestion and transformation pipelines with AWS Glue, Amazon Kinesis and Amazon EMR, models data for analytics, and owns data quality and lifecycle. AWS cited IDC research reporting that 55 percent of North American IT leaders find data engineer roles the hardest to fill.
$130k-$175k
Database migration specialist
Moves relational estates onto AWS using AWS DMS and the AWS Schema Conversion Tool, handling heterogeneous engine conversions, cutover planning, change data capture during the transition, and post-load validation.
$130k-$175k
Database reliability engineer
Owns availability and performance. Designs Multi-AZ and cross-Region topologies, builds CloudWatch and Performance Insights monitoring, diagnoses throttling and lock contention, and automates responses to recurring failure modes.
$130k-$175k
Analytics platform engineer
Operates Amazon Redshift and the surrounding lakehouse tooling, manages workload management queues and materialised views, and connects analytical storage to the operational databases feeding it.
$130k-$175k
Prerequisites & Requirements
- The exam is retired and can no longer be taken, so no prerequisite can be satisfied for it.
- When the exam ran, AWS required no formal prerequisites, consistent with its policy that all AWS certifications can be earned without completing specific prior certifications.
- AWS recommended at least five years of experience with common database technologies, as stated in the DBS-C01 exam guide.
- AWS also recommended at least two years of hands-on experience working on AWS, plus experience with both on-premises and AWS Cloud relational and NoSQL databases.
- For the live replacement, AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate, AWS recommends the equivalent of two to three years of experience in data engineering or data architecture and one to two years of hands-on AWS experience.
- An AWS Certification Account, created with an AWS Builder ID and separate from your AWS account, is needed to schedule any AWS exam.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I still take the AWS Certified Database - Specialty exam?
No. AWS retired the certification on April 30, 2024, and the final day the DBS-C01 exam could be taken was April 29, 2024. AWS announced this in a Training and Certification blog post on January 30, 2024, alongside the retirement of AWS Certified Data Analytics - Specialty and AWS Certified: SAP on AWS - Specialty. No test centre or online proctored appointment can be scheduled for it.
Why did AWS retire it?
AWS said it saw an opportunity to serve customers better by reducing the number of specialty certifications and enhancing its offerings at the foundational, associate and professional levels. In the same announcement AWS launched AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate, which became available to schedule and take on March 12, 2024, citing IDC research that North American IT leaders reported the greatest difficulty filling data engineer roles, at 55 percent.
What happens to my certification if I already earned it?
It stays active for three years from the date you earned it, and you can continue to display your digital badge from Credly. Because the last testing date was April 29, 2024, the last DBS-C01 credentials expire in April 2027. Check the exact date under Exam History in your AWS Certification Account.
Can I recertify or renew it?
No. AWS stated plainly that candidates would not be able to recertify after the retirement dates because the exams would no longer be offered. There is no continuing education credit route for AWS certifications either; AWS recertifies only by re-examination, and there is no exam to sit. Holders who want a current credential must pass a different AWS exam.
Which certification replaces it?
AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate is the certification AWS launched in the same restructuring. It costs 150 USD, runs 130 minutes, contains 65 multiple choice or multiple response questions, is offered in English, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese, and is valid for three years. AWS recommends two to three years of data engineering or data architecture experience plus one to two years of hands-on AWS experience.
How much did the exam cost when it was available?
300 USD, the AWS specialty and professional price tier. AWS publishes that tier in local currency as 256 EUR, 449 AUD, 40,000 JPY, 394,575 KRW and 2,113 CNY, with 25,659 INR available only through the Pearson VUE Mindhub voucher store. Those figures apply to the specialty exams still on offer, such as AWS Certified Security - Specialty.
What was the passing score?
750 on a scaled range of 100 to 1,000. AWS uses 750 for all professional-level and specialty exams, 720 for associate-level exams and 700 for foundational exams. The DBS-C01 exam used a compensatory scoring model, so a candidate did not need to pass each of the five domains individually, only the exam overall.
How many questions counted toward the score?
Fifty of the 65 questions were scored. The remaining 15 were unscored pretest items AWS used to evaluate questions for future use, and they were not identified during the exam. Unanswered questions were scored as incorrect and there was no penalty for guessing, so the practical advice was to answer everything.
What was the retake policy?
The general AWS policy applied: a 14-calendar-day wait after a failed attempt, no limit on the number of attempts, and the full registration fee payable each time. That policy still governs live AWS exams. Since April 29, 2024 it is moot for DBS-C01, because no further attempt can be booked at any interval.
How long did results take?
AWS posts final results to the AWS Certification Account within five business days of the exam closing, with a downloadable PDF score report under Exam History. That timing applied to DBS-C01 and still applies to every live AWS exam. The only stated exception is when results are held for security or technical review.
What were the domain weightings?
Version 2.2 of the DBS-C01 exam guide, dated August 2023, set them as Workload-Specific Database Design 26 percent, Deployment and Migration 20 percent, Management and Operations 18 percent, Monitoring and Troubleshooting 18 percent, and Database Security 18 percent. Workload-Specific Database Design carried more than a quarter of the scored content, which is why service selection questions dominated the exam.
What identification was required, and does it differ for live AWS exams?
The requirement has not changed across AWS exams. A test centre appointment needs two primary IDs, or one primary and one secondary; an online proctored appointment needs a single primary ID. A primary ID is an original, unexpired, government-issued document showing your photo, your signature and your name in Roman characters. If you do not hold a qualifying government-issued ID from the country you are testing in, an international travel passport from your country of citizenship must be the primary ID, with European Union IDs as the stated exception. ID rules differ between test centre and online appointments.
Were calculators or reference materials allowed?
No. AWS permits no calculator, scratch paper or notes in any of its certification exams. The only reference available inside the exam is the list of AWS service short names and their full names, opened through the Help button. Comfort aids such as medicines and medical devices are allowed without prior approval, per the Pearson VUE comfort aids list.
What accommodations were available?
AWS grants reasonable accommodations for documented disabilities through Pearson VUE, requested before scheduling each exam. Non-native English speakers taking an English-language exam can request ESL +30 for an additional 30 minutes, which is requested once through the AWS Certification Account and then applies to all future AWS exam registrations.
Was there a published pass rate?
No. AWS has never published pass rates for any of its certification exams, so any percentage quoted for DBS-C01 came from third parties. AWS does publish its standard-setting method: a modified Angoff panel of subject matter experts sets the raw passing standard on the initial exam form, and statistical equating adjusts it on later forms so that differences in form difficulty do not move the bar.
How did it compare with AWS Certified Data Analytics - Specialty?
Both retired in the same wave, but AWS set an earlier final testing date for Data Analytics - Specialty, April 8, 2024, against April 29, 2024 for Database - Specialty. Data Analytics covered collection, storage, processing, analysis and visualisation across Kinesis, Redshift, EMR, Glue and QuickSight, while Database - Specialty covered the operational database estate. AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate absorbed parts of both.
Is the DBS-C01 material still worth studying?
The blueprint remains a good skills checklist for anyone running databases on AWS, particularly the Workload-Specific Database Design domain that maps each engine to a workload shape. What it will not give you is a credential, and it omits topics AWS has since moved to the centre of its data curriculum, including ETL development, data pipeline design and data lake architecture, all of which the exam guide listed as out of scope.
Do my old exam prep purchases still work?
The AWS-owned material is gone. AWS withdrew the DBS-C01 Official Practice Question Sets, Official Practice Exams and Exam Prep courses from AWS Skill Builder on April 29, 2024. Third-party courses may still be accessible depending on the platform's own policy, but they teach an exam nobody can sit. AWS continues to publish free and paid database training on Skill Builder outside the certification prep catalogue.
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