Certification Updates!

Last week was already a great week with these amazing things:

• My Microsoft Data Platform MVP renewal
• The delivery of an MVP thank you kit, containing an MVP mug, hoody and sticker, by the MVP team

Thanks @Microsoft @MS_KellyKaye and @TinaStenderup for this amazing MVP gift package! https://t.co/HprkpcYF1n pic.twitter.com/3V8hhg9EW4

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) July 6, 2022

But aparently there was more! 😀

I noticed this weekend that several other people received their results on the DP-500 exam:  Designing and Implementing Enterprise-Scale Analytics Solutions Using Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Power BI, so I thought I'd check out mine too.

And you might have already guessed it: I passed! 🥳

DP-500 History

Almost 2 months ago I took the (then beta) exam DP-500, on which I wrote about earlier how to master this exam.

As the name of the exam suggests, this is not an exam for beginners. To recap a little bit from my previous blog post, the exam covers the following products/services:

• Microsoft Power BI, including some external tools
• Microsoft Purview (a.k.a. Azure Purview)
• Azure Synapse Analytics
• Azure Data Lake Gen2
• DevOps

At the end of June, the exam went live, so it's no longer in beta. This also means there is now an official course available. Although I think you could manage just fine with all the online material there is already. I mentioned quite a few in my last post. And new materials have already been added to that list, for example the newest course on PluralSight, called Optimize Enterprise-scale Data Models - DP-500, by friend and fellow MVP Nikola Ilic (@DataMozart, B).

But depending on the type of learner you are, you might do better with an in-class training, so it all depends... 😁

Never stop learning

I honoustly did not think I passed the exam, because it covers quite a few topics I do not master yet, or haven't touched that often. 

DP-500 Score report

And according to the scoring report I received, I still have some things to do on the following topics:

• Query and transform data (mainly Synapse questions for me I think hope 😀)
  This part of the exam covers:
• Query data by using Azure Synapse Analytics
• Ingest and transform data by using Power BI
• Explore and visualize data (also mainly Synapse, and some R/Python in Power BI probably)
  This part covers:
• Explore data by using Azure Synapse Analytics
• Visualize data by using Power BI

You can check out the detailed outline and all the subtopics off the exam here.

Renewed Certification

Last but not least, I also renewed my PL-300 certification (a.k.a. DA-100), the Power BI Data Analyst Associate. I got a notification that renewal was possible. It only took me 15-20 minutes, online behind my laptop. So no exam site or proctored exam room this time.

I made it with 96% of the questions right, I missed (I think) 1 question in data modeling 😇

Do you have any plans for exams? Did you get any certifications lately?

If you have any remarks and/or questions about one of these topics I mentioned, please let me know!