DP-201 Designing an Azure Data Solution Exam Preparation Guide

 Background

As part of Azure role based certifications, DP-201 Designing an Azure Data Solution certification exam is the 2nd in the list to get the Azure Data Engineer Associate certificate. I had cleared DP-200 exam earlier. Yesterday, I cleared DP-201 and achieved the Associate certification.

DP-201 Designing an Azure Data Solution Exam

This exam focusses on assessing the candidate in the following areas:

• Design Azure Data Solutions (40-45%)
• Design Data Processing Solutions (25-30%)
• Design for Data Security and compliance (25-30%)

The primary skills are tested against the following core services from Azure

• Azure Cosmos DB
• Azure Synapse Analytics
• Azure Data Lake Storage
• Azure Data Factory
• Azure Stream Analytics
• Azure Databricks
• Azure Blob Storage

Note: There are changes to the contents of the exam as of 31st July 2020. One notable exclusion from the list of services is the Azure SQL Database.

The test focusses on assessing the design skills of the candidate. It is not important to know so much about the code. We need to make the right design choices when selecting the services. Design options related to batch processing and stream processing are important. We also need to understand the different options related to disaster recovery and high availability.

All the questions are multiple-choice questions (MCQ). There are  2 case studies at the beginning of the test consisting of 9 questions. We can go back and forth on the questions within each case study and revise the answers. Once we mark the case studies as completed, we cannot go back and change the answers. The two case studies are followed by 30 questions. These questions are related to different services. Finally, there is one more case study with 3 questions towards the end. The trick here is that once a question answered, we cannot go back online the 2 earlier case studies.

Refer to the below Youtube video for more details about how I prepared for the test

Visual Notes taking

During the preparations, I also started experimenting with the visual notes taking approach. Instead of taking notes in the plain text, I started to make them more visual. Here are some examples of this approach.

I have published these visual notes to a GitHub repository in PDF as well as OneNote format. I hope people will find it useful in their preparations.

Conclusion

I found this test easier compared to DP-200. The focus of this test is on design skills and its important to understand the differences in different options available with the services. I hope you find this useful.

until next time, Code with Passion and Strive for Excellence.

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