Support for Spark SQL is being added into CDH5.5  As of today, the exam is running on CDH5.3.2 So the answer is "not yet", but that will almost certainly change in the near future.   Watch the Cloudera website:  http://www.cloudera.com/training/certification/cca-spark.html The list of required skills should give you knowledge of what technologies you will need to know. ... View more

Once you submit the exam it will be graded. An email will be sent to you the day that you take the exam that is a score report.  It will show each problem that you attempted and whether you passed or failed.  If you fail a question, it will tell you what criteria you did not answer correctly.   If you passed, within a few days after that, you will recieve another email that contains your certificate.  It will be a PDF that you can print.  No hardcopy will be provided. ... View more

The cluster will use a "recent" version of CDH.  Currently that is 5.3.2.  In the future, the answer is yes; the cluster will be upgraded to a newer version of CDH.  I would not expect an immediate change when Cloudera releases new versions of CDH, as there will need to be a period of testing the exam on the newer versions.   In general, however, you should not care what version you are using.  As this is a developer exam, there will likely be no change to the solution you provide regardless of the underlying system.  Creating a table in Impala is probably not going to change based on the cluster.  I understand there may be some effects for major changes, such as CDH 5.5.0 and the addition of tools such as Spark SQL, but changes like that will be announced on the Cloudera certification webpages. ... View more

Because of the length of the Data Science certifications, you are allowed to take breaks.  That is not necessarily true with our shorter exams.  Work with your proctor during the exam to get some time away from the computer. ... View more

http://www.cloudera.com/content/www/en-us/training/certification/cca-spark.html   CCA175 is a hands-on, practical exam using Cloudera technologies. Each user is given their own CDH5 (currently 5.3.2) cluster pre-loaded with Spark, Impala, Crunch, Hive, Pig, Sqoop, Kafka, Flume, Kite, Hue, Oozie, DataFu, and many others (See a full list). In addition the cluster also comes with Python (2.6 and 3.4), Perl 5.10, Elephant Bird, Cascading 2.6, Brickhouse, Hive Swarm, Scala 2.11, Scalding, IDEA, Sublime, Eclipse, and NetBeans.   Since these are developer questions, the particular version of CDH should not matter much.  The Quickstart VM should be almost identical to the cluster environment.   The cluster supports Python 2.6, 2.7, and 3.4 ... View more

There is no longer a multiple-choice exam; there are now only the practical exams where you need to do work on a cluster.  There are currently no sample questions available for this exam.   -Judd   ... View more