PREPARING FOR AND PASSING DP-600 EXAM: IMPLEMENTING ANALYTICS SOLUTIONS IN MICROSOFT FABRIC

I  successfully sat and passed the above exam in the last week of June and earned my Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate certificate.

The exam costs $160 but I was lucky to get a voucher that covered the full amount. The voucher was earned by participating to completion in a Microsoft learn challenge that ran between March and April 2024.

Exam Sections

  • Plan, implement and manage a solution for data analytics
  • Prepare and serve data
  • Implement and manage semantic models
  • Explore and analyze data
If you are planning on taking the exam, this would be my advice to you after you have completely read through the study guide on your own.
  1. check out Learn Microsoft Fabric with Will a YouTube playlist going through the study guide. The material they went through and the sample questions after each video/section on the playlist are a good introduction to the sections and question style of the exam. I am inclined to say that this takes the most credit on how I managed to pass. 
Note: This is a good switch from having to actively read. You can passively listen to the whole playlist whilst engaging in other activities.
  1. Take the practice question by Microsoft as many times as you can until all the questions are familiar/near familiar. This should be done almost everyday of the last week leading to exams. They consume less than 20 minutes a day.

Be generally confident in your understanding of  the following concepts:

  • Storage modes: import, dual, direct query, direct lake.
  • Where to go if there is a need for quick formatting, advanced data processing.
  • Security: object, row level among others.
  • Identifying performance issues - resource intensive workloads.
  • Dynamic management views (sys.dm_exec_connections/sessions/requests).
  • Minimize administrative effort - least privilege.
  • DAX studio and Tabular editor tools like: best practices analyzer.
  • The power query editor -  add columns etc.
  • What the power query options do : column distribution/profile/quality etc.
  • Visualization of data and appropriate visuals for specific types of data.
  • T-SQL statements: GROUP BY, ORDER BY, JOINS, LAG, LEAD, WHERE, HAVING, UNIONS, ROW_NUMBER() etc.
  • Ingesting data into the warehouse - copy data activity  - instances, which fields are mandatory.
  • Using notebooks to load and read data. The commands.
  • Views and what they are used for - especially as relating to security.
  • Which language should you use to transform data in the dataflow?
  • Star schema and snowflake.
  • Slowly changing dimensions.
  • Staging - bridge tables.
  • V-order, optimize , vacuum, coalesce, repartition etc.
  • Query folding.
  • Roles in fabric - For this, it is easier to know what an admin and member can only do and what a viewer can do. The rest can be done by the contributor role.
  • Large format semantic models and composite models.
  • Calculation groups and the command needed.
  • Incremental refresh: RangeStart and RangeEnd parameters.
  • The XMLA endpoint.
The breakdown above is not section-wise. It is all the random concepts that I remember.
Her is a link to my LinkedIn to view the certificate and others LinkedIn

Good reading!
~NMN

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