Preparing for the DP-900 certificate

DP-900

As a 2022 goal, I needed an Azure fundamentals certificate, so I compared the AZ-900 (Azure Fundamentals) with the ?DP-900 (Azure Data Fundamentals) and came to the conclusion that the DP-900 would suit me the best.

The candidates for the DP-900 are tested on these 4 skills:

·???????Understand core data concepts

·???????Describe how to work with relational data on Azure

·???????Describe how to work with non-relational data on Azure

·???????Describe an analytics workload on Azure

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The road I walked

I have taken different paths to get myself ready for the exam. I tried several free videos on Youtube but it was not suiting me. Because the DP-900 concerns many different products that often have similar names, such as all kinds of Azure SQL databases, I couldn't tell them all apart.

I continued with Microsoft Learn and copied a lot from it to a Word document. That made a difference but not enough.

Then I went to look at Udemy. I watched a part of this training, https://inergy.udemy.com/course/dp-900-microsoft-azure-data-fundamentals-course/

This one also didn't suit me well, because a big part of the course, was actually filled with demo’s done in the Azure portal. However, this course comes with a very good PDF package (55 pages) that contains everything you need to know for the exam. So a recommendation anyway.

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A colleague gave me the following link Test Prep Training | Practice Exam Questions |Practice Tests for Certifications This was my game changer. Here you can practice questions mixed up like an exam or per topic. The answers contain explanations and links to more explanations. You can check the questions directly or simulate an exam. It's a paid site, but it doesn't cost that much and it's very worth it.

This worked very well for me. I copied the questions with right or wrong to Word and started to categorize them, in the Word file, by color, like

·???????Azure SQL database

·???????Azure Data Factory

·???????Azure Data Lake Storage

·???????Azure Data Bricks

·???????Azure Cosmos DB

·???????Others

And that finally… gave me a good overview and I started to understand the flow from data ingesting to using data in, for example, Power BI and the associated products.

In the end, I repeated the exams endlessly until I understood them and, of course, could also literally remember difficult questions.

The exam

During the exam I had enough time, it is a short exam, about 45 minutes, and about the same number of questions. About a quarter of the questions are very easy, a quarter corresponded to the practiced questions, a quarter was ok to do and the last 25% were more difficult, of which I had to guess only 4 questions in the end.

Incidentally, there are also many questions where you get points for several parts. That also helps you to get more points if you don't master everything.

Conclusion

?Although it is still not in my comfort zone, I learned a lot from this preparation. Like the difference between On-premise, IAAS, PAAS and SAAS,or what products are used in the ETL process.

I wouldn't recommend this one if you don't have to, but on the other hand, it's a good motivation to get a better understanding of the Azure cloud.