IICTI Certified Database Administrator

Holders demonstrate that they can apply and evaluate storage engine internals, MVCC and transaction isolation, query optimization, execution plans and indexing strategy, high availability, replication and failover architecture and backup, point-in-time recovery and disaster recovery engineering, plus 7 further areas, in realistic professional scenarios, as defined in the AQSCERT scheme for Database Administrator.

Who it is for: Professionals working, or preparing to work, in data roles.

1. 01Storage engine internals, MVCC and transaction isolation9% of the exam

   • Diagnose concurrency anomalies, bloat and lock contention by reasoning from engine internals and isolation semantics.
   • Scope: B-tree and LSM storage engines, page/buffer management, WAL and redo/undo, MVCC visibility and vacuum/purge, isolation anomalies (write skew, lost update) under RC, RR, SI and SSI across PostgreSQL, MySQL InnoDB, SQL Server and Oracle.
2. 02Query optimization, execution plans and indexing strategy14% of the exam

   • Evaluate execution plans and design indexing and statistics strategies that eliminate plan regressions at production scale.
   • Scope: Cost-based optimizer statistics and cardinality estimation, plan analysis (EXPLAIN ANALYZE, Query Store, AWR/ASH), join algorithms, covering/partial/expression/BRIN/GIN indexes, plan regression and plan forcing, parameter sniffing.
3. 03High availability, replication and failover architecture7% of the exam

   • Architect HA topologies that meet defined RPO/RTO targets and justify consistency versus availability trade-offs.
   • Scope: Physical vs logical replication, synchronous/quorum commit, Patroni/etcd, Always On AGs, Oracle Data Guard, MySQL Group Replication/InnoDB Cluster, split-brain prevention, fencing, replica lag and read-routing.
4. 04Backup, point-in-time recovery and disaster recovery engineering13% of the exam

   • Design and validate backup and DR strategies with tested, measurable recovery objectives including ransomware scenarios.
   • Scope: Physical/logical backups, WAL/binlog archiving and PITR (pgBackRest, Barman, RMAN, XtraBackup), immutable and air-gapped copies, cross-region DR, restore testing, corruption detection and recovery runbooks.
5. 05Distributed SQL, partitioning and horizontal scaling5% of the exam

   • Evaluate scale-out options and design partitioning or sharding schemes that preserve correctness and performance.
   • Scope: Declarative partitioning and partition pruning, sharding (Citus, Vitess), distributed SQL (CockroachDB, YugabyteDB, Spanner), consensus (Raft/Paxos), shard-key selection, rebalancing and cross-shard transactions.
6. 06Performance diagnostics and capacity engineering8% of the exam

   • Diagnose systemic performance bottlenecks and produce evidence-based capacity and tuning plans.
   • Scope: Wait-event analysis, pg_stat_statements, Performance Schema, DMVs, OS-level I/O/CPU/memory profiling, connection pooling (PgBouncer, ProxySQL), memory and checkpoint tuning, workload forecasting and benchmarking (pgbench, sysbench, HammerDB).
7. 07Cloud-managed and multi-engine database platforms6% of the exam

   • Architect database platforms across managed, self-hosted and Kubernetes deployment models with defensible cost and resilience trade-offs.
   • Scope: Amazon RDS/Aurora, Azure SQL/Managed Instance, Cloud SQL/AlloyDB, serverless and storage-disaggregated architectures, Kubernetes operators (CloudNativePG, Crunchy), cost/performance models and engine selection including NoSQL and vector stores.
8. 08Database security hardening and data protection14% of the exam

   • Design defence-in-depth controls that protect sensitive data and withstand privilege-escalation and exfiltration scenarios.
   • Scope: Least-privilege role design, row-level security, TDE and column encryption, key management (KMS/HSM), TLS/mTLS, auditing (pgAudit, SQL Server Audit), CIS Benchmarks, data masking and secrets rotation.
9. 09Zero-downtime schema evolution and online migrations10% of the exam

   • Lead complex schema changes and platform migrations with zero or bounded downtime and verified data integrity.
   • Scope: Expand/contract migrations, online DDL (gh-ost, pt-online-schema-change, pg_repack), logical replication cut-overs, heterogeneous migrations (AWS DMS, ora2pg), Flyway/Liquibase, version upgrades and rollback planning.
10. 10Observability, automation and database reliability engineering8% of the exam

    • Lead a database reliability practice that automates operations and manages risk through SLOs and incident learning.
    • Scope: Database SLIs/SLOs, metrics and tracing (Prometheus exporters, OpenTelemetry), alerting design, infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible), automated provisioning and patching, chaos testing, incident response and blameless postmortems.
11. 11Data governance, compliance and lifecycle management6% of the exam

    • Evaluate database estates against regulatory and organisational obligations and design compliant data lifecycle controls.
    • Scope: GDPR and national data protection law (data subject rights, erasure), retention and purge policies, data classification, PCI DSS and ISO/IEC 27001 controls for databases, audit evidence, archiving and legal hold.

Question types

Single choice 100%

Delivery

Online (remote proctored), Test centre, On-site (corporate)

Retakes

Up to three attempts within any 12-month period. A 14-day waiting period applies after a first unsuccessful attempt and 30 days after a second. Each retake requires a new booking and fee. Retakes draw a different randomised form from the question bank.

Provisional cut score — psychometric validation is required before live delivery. Blueprint v1.0.

1. 1

   Register

   Create a free account and start the programme.

2. 2

   Practice

   Online practice test (coming soon).

3. 3

   Training

   Optional

   Online course or classroom — or skip it.

4. 4

   Certification

   Independent exam and certification decision.

Training is optional and does not by itself confer certification. Find a training partner