Passed! DP-900 Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals - Overview

Today I passed the Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals exam (DP-900) and this post is going to be a quick overview of how I prepared, links to some of the training material I used and general thoughts. I'll publish a more comprehensive exam prep guide very soon.

As the name clearly states this is a fundamentals exam and whilst I'd say that the exam content isn't particularly deep at a technical level it does cover a broad range of content so without a doubt it definitely requires putting some work in.

To start, here's the official link for the exam page. This page will highlight any upcoming changes to the exam material (currently scheduled 22/10), you can schedule the actual exam here and most importantly for the purpose of studying see the skills measured and download the exam outline.

The skills measured show the percentage breakdown of exam topic material; at the time of writing it is as follows:

• Describe core data concepts (15-20%)
• Describe how to work with relational data on Azure (25-30%)
• Describe how to work with non-relational data on Azure (25-30%)
• Describe an analytics workload on Azure (25-30%)

Already we can see a split between concept based questions and then workload based which is broken down between relational and non-relational data in Azure as well Analytics. The exam outline link gives us much more information on what data topics are covered so definitely have a read through. Very important, the link allow highlights forthcoming changes so make sure you check those if you're planning on taking the exam after the changes are implemented.

Going back to the exam page under the skills measured we can see the exam preparation options; either instructor led (not covered) or online via the Microsoft Learn platform. Directly from this course page we have [completely free] learning material broken into four learning paths for each of the Azure Data Fundamentals skills areas. 

Each learning path is further broken down into a number of modules of material which will be text based content explaining concepts, some videos and perhaps the most useful feature of Microsoft Learn, hands-on exercises aka learn by doing, which make use of a Microsoft Azure sandbox so you can really get stuck into actually using the different solutions. At the end of each module you get a knowledge check which is a couple of multiple questions before a summary.

For the exam, the exercises definitely need completed so you can understand how things are setup and how things work. In addition, I seriously recommend the further official documentation material that is linked to on each module summary. Although it's a fundamentals exam, it definitely helps to understand some of the detail. 

I do need to give two shout outs; Gregor Suttie for his exam prep guide for DP-900 and John Savill for his exam prep whiteboard video. Right now my normal training providers don't have courses running for DP-900 so I've also been using material from the DP200 and DP201 exams which I will doing next, of course they're a little deeper.

So there's a whole bunch of links to get you started if you're looking at taking the DP-900 Azure Data Fundamentals exam. Overall it was pretty straightforward, I got a really good score which I am delighted with and I will post up a much more comprehensive study guide pretty soon.

Thanks for reading and good luck!