My Experience and top tips for the Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate Certification (DP-600)
If you want to showcase your Microsoft Fabric prowess, DP-600 is the certification you are looking for. With a syllabus covering data analytics, data engineering, platform management and enterprise development best practices, it is indeed a test worthy of Analytics Engineers.
Personally, I felt this was the hardest Microsoft Exam I’ve taken to date, due to the wide range of topics covered, but with a few good learning resources and tips & tricks, I managed to walk out of the exam with a score of 921 out of 1000. Plenty more than the 700 needed to pass.
Below, I’ve put together a small cheat sheet of learning resources that I used, tips & tricks for the exam, as well as some of the topics which I was surprised to face.
Learning Resources before the Exam
Learning Path — Your point of departure should be the official Microsoft Learning Path. It is especially great at introducing general concepts of Microsoft Fabric, while it is perhaps less good at guiding you towards specific knowledge that may help you answer exam questions: Exam DP-600: Implementing Analytics Solutions Using Microsoft Fabric — Certifications | Microsoft Learn
Microsoft Lab Exercises — Nothing beats Hands On experience. And while I’d always recommend true project experience over any other resource, the online Lab Exercises created by Microsoft are frankly a great substitute. They are scattered around the Learning Path, but worth visiting on their own. Check them out here: mslearn-fabric (microsoftlearning.github.io)
Microsoft Practice Assessment — Microsoft have their own practice test which allows you to try your best on 50 sample questions (which are not 1:1 equal to actual exam questions, but come pretty close!). Also, the pool of sample questions is greater than 50, so be sure to retake the test once or twice to see more of them. Check it out here: Practice Assessment | Microsoft Learn
Pragmatic Works — I am by no means affiliated with Pragmatic Works but found that their CertXP platform had an incredible range of questions which were very similar to the ones on the exam itself. However, the most impressive part of the platform is the thorough explanations that follow each answer. I can only recommend you try it yourself.
During the exam
Look for patterns in the answers — Multiple Choice tests will always possess some degree of predictability, and that goes for DP-600 too. In many cases, especially those that ask you to pick the correct line of code, I found that of the four different choices, there would usually be two options which would be almost identical, a third which was quite different, and a fourth which was completely different. In my experience, the correct answer was always one of the two options which were almost identical.
Use Microsoft Learn during the exam! — As of September last year, all role based exams have access to Microsoft Learn from the exam environment. I used it to search for definitions I had no clue about (DMVs — I’m looking at you!), I used it to validate answers where I was only 80% certain, and I used it to disqualify some answer options for those questions where I knew I had to submit a complete guess anyway.
Read Case Questions before reading the Case — The exam, like all other role based exams from Microsoft, includes a case study that requires you to read quite a bit of text material. However, only a fraction of the text in the case is actually related to the questions that you receive (the pool of questions is much larger than the 6–8 questions you will see). Read the questions first, and then scan the case for the relevant information afterwards.
Questions are not fully up to date — Updates to Microsoft Fabric are coming out faster than a horse can run (as we say in Danish). And some of the questions on the exam are already outdated. They may not be plain wrong, but may be missing an otherwise obvious choice as the answer. As an example, the recent additions to allow RLS editing directly in the semantic model web authoring experience, was not a possible answer option during RLS questions on the test.
Topics which took up a larger part of the exam than I expected
DMVs (Dynamic Management Views) and how each view could be used.
Query Folding, and how to tell which steps are folding and which are not. Especially using the Dataflow web experience, not the Power Query desktop experience.
Data Profiling tools in dataflows (again using the web experience UI, not the desktop Power Query UI), with very specific distinctions between Column Quality, Distribution and Profile.
External tools, including Tabular Editor, ALM Toolkit, DAX Studio, Best Practice Analyzer and Vertipaq Analyzer.
PySpark code snippets. Both “fill in the blanks” type questions, and ‘pick the correct syntax from these examples’ type questions. Especially surprised to see that not only data transformation but also data exploration with PySpark saw quite a bit of emphasis during the test.
Armed with the above, and a bit of studying, I’m sure the certification is within reach for you as well!
Do you have any other tips & tricks to share with fellow Microsoft Data Professionals? Feel free to share them in the comments.
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