Exam #1: Questions on Exam #70-433

I need to blog this now... before I forget. Everybody's exam is different, because they (randomly?) pull 50 questions for you from an inventory of several hundred possible questions. But here are some questions that were on my exam #70-433. (Somebody please tell me if I'll get in trouble with Microsoft for blogging about this!)

1. My first questions was on UNION ALL. Funny that I stumbled on this one at first, then went back and changed my answer. As you know, Union All will return all rows, whereas UNION will return only distinct rows. If you know that, you'll get this question right.
   
2. MERGE TOP 3 .... Of the 50 questions on my exam, this was my only question on the MERGE operation, which surprised me. I had studied the MERGE but I had never seen it with the TOP clause. The possible answers were 0, 3, 6, and 9. I guessed 3 and later learned that was correct! The TOP 3 clause will affect a maximum of 3 records total... this is true for INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, as well as the MERGE.
   
3. To my surprise, I didn't get any questions about simple XML. In other words, the words "FOR XML RAW", "FOR XML AUTO", or "FOR XML EXPLICIT" were not even on my exam at all! But the exam is 12% XML, per Microsoft. For me, the XML questions were mostly about XPATH and XQUERY. Luckily, studying the examples of XPATH/XQUERY that came on the CD was enough to understand the basics and be able to answer the questions.
   
4. What file types do you feed into the Data Tuning Advisor (DTA)? There were 6 options. I think I got this one wrong... I chose XML, SQL, and something else. The more correct answer is this: trace files, trace tables, and SQL scripts.
   
5. One question I remember was straight from the practice exam. ALTER TABLE SWITCH was the answer. The question was: "You have two partitioned tables named Transaction and TransactionHistory. You need to archive one of the partitions of the Transaction table to the TransactionHistory table. Which method should you use?"
   

All the questions were multiple choice. A few questions were checkboxes where you choose more than one answer... but the question would tell you to "choose 2" or "choose 3" so that was nice.

It seemed to me like the questions were either easy SQL questions, or more difficult configuration questions. Maybe that's because I know SQL itself better than the components (Profiler, DTA, SQL Mail, etc) that go along with the SQL database development. I really feel that the 200 study questions on the CD that came with the book were excellent preparation for the exam... the training kit was an excellent bargain at $40.