Hello everybody... this is my only post so far this year in 2011. Yes, I fell behind my schedule to finish the 6 certs in one year. I am half-way done though! I passed 3 exams... and it took about 2 years.
One reason for the delay is that I got a promotion at work. It came right after I had read and re-read the BI book ("70-448 Training Kit: SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence Development and Mainenance" by Microsoft Press, which is one of the best technology books I've read). And because of the promotion I decided to switch routes and take the DBA certs first. So I put the BI book back on the shelf and read the DBA book instead.
So... here's my adventures with the DBA certification.
I read the DBA book which is "70-432 Training Kit: SQL Server 2008 Implementation and Mainenance", also by Microsoft Press. Excellent book, with great reasonable info, but the editing wasn't great so it had many inconsistencies... there is probably a newer edition out by now.
I went through all the questions on the CD... almost all of them. I took the exam on Dec 2 2011 and failed it! I WAS SHOCKED. And embarrassed... too embarrassed to blog about it at the time. My score was 622, but 700 was needed.
It's HARD! I had studied and learned so MUCH. But it seemed like nothing I studied was on the exam. For real... encryption and TDE were not even on the exam. The word encryption may have been mentioned once. The exam had a lot of questions on high availability. I should have known better than to study the encryption so much, it was very interesting and I just couldn't stop. But there wasn't a chapter in the DBA book on encryption (just one on security in general). But there were 4 chapters on high availability... HINT HINT.
Also, I didn't do a good job at making good guesses that day. There was one question that asked something about a log file and what folder would it be located in, I shouldda answered the path that had "LOG" in the path, but I didn't. So I got that one wrong.
Okay, I don't know if this is related or not. But at the beginning of the test, before the test starts, there's a question asking which DBMSs you're PROFICIENT at. I answered MS Access and SQL Server. I should have answered just MS Access... because during the rest of the exam I was feeling over-confident... and kept thinking that if I didn't know about something, then it must not exist. For example, in a question about the profiler and whether it can be used to monitor for deprecated features (or something like that), I answered no (basically), but sure enough it can! I was thinking if it can monitor for something like that, then I would know about it! But see, that attitude is why I got that one wrong. Also, did you know that a SQL job can be set to delete itself after the job has run?
Moral to the story that may apply to all exams about a software product: If you don't know for sure that it can't do something, then assume it can!
But one failure does not end the story!
The following week, I went through my notes and printed every question that I had pasted into notepad files from the CD. I discovered that I had skipped a chunk of questions from the CD... so no wonder I had failed the exam! So I went through all of those questions and pasted the interesting ones into a notepad doc. I then printed all my notes, and went through them all again and highlighted important stuff. I also researched further into a few things that didn't make sense.
* One thing I researched further was the logging that occurs in FULL verses BULK LOAD logging. I learned that you can flip a database between the two recovery models and it won't affect or interrupt your logs. And... this is important... a backup of your transaction log will be very large when you perform a bulk load (bcp, bulk insert, etc). The reason is because the backup of the t-log will contain the data that was loaded. Interesting huh? So the t-log itself won't contain the bulk operation, but the BACKUP of the t-log will. There was a question on that in the exam.
I then took the exam on Dec 21 and passed it... with 766, so barely getting the minimum of 700. But YAY, very glad I can move on to the next DBA exam for the PRO level. This time, I'm gonna order the Transcender study questions to get ready for it.
Oh, the exams now contain a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). So I can no longer post questions from the exam here on my blog. :-(
I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas this past weekend! This week between Christmas and New Years is an excellent week for studying... not much going on in the office so it's a great time to read up on blogs and study material.
Until next year.
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