We list the exam objectives. I’d recommend you do a comparison on our website. I would say that exam helps with CCA (though you need to pick up Spark which you should anyway) but it’d be harder to tell with CCP where you could use MapReduce or Spark (you’re choosing).
For example, it says that you learned ingest with Sqoop and Flume but to what level? Do you know how to limit the ingest, do incremental ingests, do you know how to evaluate the data, and transform it and land it on HDFS in a particular format? Do you understand various file formats and compression such that if we give you a scenario you could look at an evaluate whether the data should land in a row-based or columnar format, what compression and partitioning it should get, etc.
For CCP, you should know all that -- and know it well (and much more of course)-- and you have to be able to do all those things, actually write the code or use the tools on the command-line to process the data. In CCA, you have to be able to do it but we’re easier on you. We say “ingest this with Sqoop and land it this way,” or “write the data to Avro” or “evolve this schema” and so on.
