During early December, Microsoft held a Fabric certification challenge, which required participants to:
- Join the Fabric Community.
- Complete all modules in the Microsoft Learn Challenge | Ignite Edition: Fabric Challenge.
- Not already hold the Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate (DP-600) certification.
- Be confident that they could take and pass the DP-600 exam by December 31, 2024.
By completing these requirements, Microsoft would provide a free voucher for the DP-600 certification test. As I have always thought about getting some Microsoft certifications—and since I have spent a good amount of time with Fabric I decided to give it a try and see if I could complete this challenge.
Microsoft Learn Fabric Challenge
As I was already member in Fabric Community, I started this challenge by completing all the learning modules. You can find the complete list of modules from this page. The challenge contained approx. 13 hours of learning material, but as I already had a lot of experience from Fabric I skipped most the labs. That saved some time and I could spent that time on some other learning materials. I read all the materials carefully and learned a lot from it, so I can highly suggest this material for anyone working with Microsoft Fabric. Especially the semantic model was new to me as I haven’t work at all with Power BI (more about that later).
The full learning material for DP-600 is a bit longer. If you want to take this certification test, I highly recommend to go through all that material in Microsoft Learn.
Free Learning Materials
Microsoft Learn is a great free source of learning materials, but I wanted to have a bit deeper understanding about Semantic Models, Dax queries, Power BI tools etc. so I decided to look material from Youtube also (as videos are very easy to consume and learn new things). Luckily I found the great DP-600 learning series from Will Needham. I watched all these videos and found them super helpful. Another big recommendation for Will’s videos. I would have not passed the exam without Will’s help.
The Practice Test
After walking through the Learn material + Wills videos I decided to do the practice test. Microsoft recommends that you would get 80% correct multiple times, before attempting the real test. I have to say that I 100% agreed on this one. The practice test asks lots of similar questions, that are in the real test, but they are not completely same. So you cannot learn questions and answers through in practice test and then go with it into a real thing.
The question pool in practice test is rather low, but I still couldn’t get 80% multiple times in a row. I think my first test result was like ~60% and after learning some questions through I got it into 75-80%. The cool thing in practice test is, that it shows what are your weak areas and in what you excel well. Of course my caveat was the Semantic Model and DAX queries as I had never used them. I think my answer rate in that category was close to 40-50%.
DAX queries and Dax Studios
I went through some comments about the DP-600 exam tests before taking it and found out that some people said they didn’t have any questions about DAX queries in the actual test. Phew! I thought. Maybe they removed them since they aren’t a significant part of the Fabric data platform. Oh boy, how wrong I was. I had multiple questions about those god damn (sorry) DAX queries and about those weird Power BI third-party tools. Well, the certification page states that:
You should also be able to query and analyze data by using Structured Query Language (SQL), Kusto Query Language (KQL), and Data Analysis Expressions (DAX).
That is true, so be prepared to answer some questions about DAX, SQL and KQL.
The Real Test
I did the real test in the morning. I have learned that my ability to concentrate is best at mornings (before 11), so by doing test early in the morning would give me best change to succeed. The test itself was quite a brutal experience. You can do the test online, but you need to have a silence and clean space to do it. I decided to do it at home as I have huge monitor in my home office and I can easily close the outside world from the room. As you can use Microsoft Learn during the exam (yes you can browse it, but not any other sites) I knew that I need to have good monitor to hold the Learn website side-by-side with the exam questions. The time limit in exam is quite tight, so you cannot seek answers to many of the questions. I still found it useful as I don’t remember all the small bits in SQL queries or file paths and you can check the small details from docs.
My biggest problem during the test was that I am used to moving when I read and think. I lean forward, backward, swirl around in a chair, etc. This is not allowed during the test. You need to stay within the camera boundaries (yes, you are recorded while taking the test) at all times. I received two stern warnings about my movement early in the test, so I had to sit still for the rest of the time and sacrifice a bit of my focus to avoid moving back and forth while reading😆. Doesn’t sound huge, but as the whole test is a bit stressful experience it adds bit of spicyness into the sauce.
Summary
For me the test was hard. I think my score was just above the minimum 700 limit. I had a great struggle with all the Power BI stuff and that is frankly quite big part of this exam. Luckily you can learn the basics quite fast and get some of those questions right. This gives some room to have a failure or two in other sections of the exam.
Finally if you want three tips from this blog post they are:
- Do the practice assessment and get that 80% correct before you go to do the real test
- Watch all of those great learning videos from Will
- Read through all the Learn materials about DP-600. You can use this material during the exam, so it is good to know what you can find from it.