IICTI Certified Database Implementation

Holders demonstrate that they can apply and evaluate requirements-driven conceptual, logical and physical data modelling, platform and engine selection, sizing and licensing, database-as-code provisioning and environment automation and database CI/CD and versioned schema change pipelines, plus 8 further areas, in realistic professional scenarios, as defined in the AQSCERT scheme for Database Implementation.

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

1. 01Requirements-driven conceptual, logical and physical data modelling9% of the exam

   • Design traceable conceptual, logical and physical data models that satisfy functional, volumetric and regulatory requirements with justified trade-offs.
   • Scope: Requirements elicitation and traceability into conceptual, logical and physical models; key strategy, normalisation and deliberate denormalisation, temporal/bitemporal and history patterns, hierarchies, multi-tenancy patterns, data dictionaries and data contracts.
2. 02Platform and engine selection, sizing and licensing8% of the exam

   • Evaluate candidate database platforms and produce defensible sizing, licensing and TCO recommendations for a new implementation.
   • Scope: Workload characterisation, weighted engine/service selection and PoC criteria, managed vs self-managed trade-offs, CPU/memory/IOPS/storage sizing, cloud instance and storage classes, licensing models (per-core, SE2, SSPL/GPL), support lifecycles, data residency and TCO.
3. 03Database-as-code provisioning and environment automation8% of the exam

   • Architect repeatable, policy-compliant automation that provisions and configures database environments safely across the delivery lifecycle.
   • Scope: Terraform/OpenTofu state, lifecycle and refactoring, Ansible and Packer, Kubernetes operators and StatefulSets, parameter and secret management (Vault, cloud secret stores), policy-as-code guardrails, drift detection and ephemeral environment builds.
4. 04Database CI/CD and versioned schema change pipelines8% of the exam

   • Design and govern CI/CD pipelines that deliver versioned, tested and auditable database changes from development to production.
   • Scope: Flyway, Liquibase, Sqitch and Atlas mechanics (checksums, baselines, changelog locks, repeatable and non-transactional migrations), state- vs migration-based delivery, linting, database unit tests (pgTAP, tSQLt), drift checks, promotion and approval gates.
5. 05Heterogeneous schema and procedural code conversion9% of the exam

   • Evaluate conversion complexity and implement semantically equivalent schemas and procedural code on a different database engine.
   • Scope: Cross-engine conversion (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL to PostgreSQL and others): data type, NULL, collation and identifier semantics, character set expansion, sequences and identity, PL/SQL and T-SQL to PL/pgSQL patterns, assessment tooling (ora2pg, AWS SCT, SSMA) and equivalence testing.
6. 06Bulk load, CDC synchronisation and migration reconciliation8% of the exam

   • Design and execute data movement with change data capture and prove completeness and correctness through systematic reconciliation.
   • Scope: Initial load strategies and throughput engineering, consistent snapshots and CDC start positions, log-based CDC prerequisites (Debezium, LogMiner, binlog, logical decoding), lag and slot management, and data validation by counts, checksums and control totals.
7. 07Implementing HA/DR topologies to meet RPO and RTO targets8% of the exam

   • Architect and validate HA/DR implementations whose measured RPO and RTO meet the agreed business targets.
   • Scope: Translating BIA tiers into topologies; synchronous vs asynchronous and quorum replication settings, consensus and fencing (Patroni, Group Replication, Always On), multi-AZ and cross-region designs, delayed replicas, immutable backups, DR drills and failback.
8. 08Security, privacy and compliance controls implementation9% of the exam

   • Implement layered database security and privacy controls that satisfy data protection obligations and withstand audit.
   • Scope: TLS and certificate validation, TDE and column-level encryption with KMS, IAM/Entra ID database authentication, least-privilege roles and RLS, secrets rotation, masking and pseudonymisation, auditing, GDPR and Albanian Law 124/2024 principles (by design, minimisation, erasure, DPIA).
9. 09Application and data pipeline integration engineering8% of the exam

   • Design robust integration between the database, applications and data pipelines that remains correct under failure, retry and change.
   • Scope: Driver and connection pool configuration (HikariCP, PgBouncer, RDS Proxy), timeouts and failover-aware connection strings, retry and idempotency, transactional outbox and CDC to Kafka with schema registry, incremental extraction, stable integration interfaces and tracing.
10. 10Performance baselining, acceptance and load testing for go-live8% of the exam

    • Evaluate pre-production performance against agreed non-functional requirements and establish the baseline handed over to operations.
    • Scope: Workload modelling from production evidence, open vs closed load models and coordinated omission, percentile-based acceptance criteria, pgbench/HammerDB/sysbench and capture-replay, soak, stress and failover-under-load tests, Little's law and baseline reporting.
11. 11Cutover, rollback, hypercare and operational handover9% of the exam

    • Lead go-live cutover and handover with controlled rollback options and verifiable operational readiness.
    • Scope: Cutover strategies (big bang, phased, parallel run), runbooks and rehearsals, go/no-go criteria, point of no return, fallback via reverse replication, hypercare exit criteria, operational readiness review and handover of runbooks, SLOs, monitoring and access.
12. 12Implementation governance, risk and quality assurance8% of the exam

    • Lead the governance of a database implementation so that scope, risk, quality and compliance are controlled and evidenced.
    • Scope: Requirements traceability, RAID and decision logs, ADRs, change control, estimation from assessment evidence, earned value, quality gates and acceptance (UAT/OAT), ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A and ISO/IEC 25010 alignment, supplier and data ownership governance.

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