How I passed the DP-700 Exam

I recently took and passed the DP-700 exam, which is required for the Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification. It’s the second Fabric certification, and it focuses more on the data engineering aspect of Fabric, as well as a bit of governance and administration. My preparation for this exam is probably fairly atypical, because:

• I have quite some experience already building data warehouses, mainly on the Microsoft stack. This means I didn’t have to study dimensional design methods or how to write T-SQL. I’ve done this enough over the years that I can skip the preparation for subjects like this.
• Fabric itself is quite new, but I have written many articles on this subject, so I’ve played with the product and familiarized myself with most of its features.

So what did I do to prepare myself? I went over the blog posts written by Reitse and Nikola for the general Fabric stuff, and Kevin Chant‘s posts for the CI/CD stuff. I also went through the entire Fabric learning path where I did the exercises and answered the questions. For every topic where I’m not 100% confident, I read the documentation. This is important, as the documentation goes deeper than the learning modules and often lists limitations or restrictions.

But what if you’re quite new to the Microsoft Data Platform? Here are some tips:

• there are free webinars that you can follow to prepare yourself for the exam.
• learn more about dimensional modelling and star schema design. You should know what facts and dimensions are, how to write ETL for them and what the different types of slowly changing dimensions are.
• check out the Fabric community zone for interesting resources
• practice. Do tutorials. Break stuff.
• you might get questions about the programming languages T-SQL, KQL and Spark (Python, SparkSQL, PySpark). It’s not necessary that you master all of them. I know a lot of T-SQL and the basics of KQL. I’m not that fluent in Python but I can read it. But during the exam, you can use the Microsoft Learn documentation site to look up articles. This means you don’t have to know all of the syntax, you can just look it up. But you probably won’t have time to do this for every question.
• it’s a certification exam with a lot of multiple choice. Suppose you have 4 possible answers. Typically, 2 of them don’t make any sense 🙂 If you know your stuff, you can spot them easily. Between the other 2, you can make an educated guess. Sometimes one of them is the obvious correct answer. Sometimes, 2 answers can be valid. In that case, you have to wonder: what answer does Microsoft want me to pick? Which is cheapest to implement or the easiest to optimize? Which one has the best performance, or is a feature Microsoft wants to push?