Passing the 70-767 Implementing a Data Warehouse exam has been a goal of mine for a while now, and I finally achieved that on 11/30/2020! The exam is going to be retired soon (January 31st, 2021), so this was cutting it close. And since the exam is going to be retired in 62 days of starting this post, I’m not going to post in my usual format for passing an exam. If you do have questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments. (Note: I do not plan on breaking the Microsoft NDA I signed in the exam, so any content in the comments will adhere to the NDA or will be removed.)
Overall when taking the exam, I felt less prepared than I was hoping for. I could really tell what questions I was getting right and I really knew what questions I had no idea about. What surprised me after the exam is that I passed with a higher score than I did for the 761 or 762. Thinking back on the exams, I would say I spent the most time studying on the 767.
My primary method of studying was threefold:
- The 70-767 Exam book
- EDX courses for Data Quality Services (DQS) and Master Data Services (MDS)
- The 70-767 MeasureUp practice test
(You can view my post with a link to my study guide and resources here)
The 70-767 exam book was used to give me a quick summary of the material. Towards the end of the book, I started up the EDX courses. Once the EDX courses were completed, I worked through the practice exam.
I haven’t used DQS or MDS before, so this was a learning curve for me. I felt pretty good about Warehouse design and its implementation in SSIS, so I really focused on those other two subjects. I read through and attempted to practice DQS and MDS through the 767 book, but the instructions left a lot to be desired and it was not a smooth learning experience.
Working off the 767 book, I couldn’t get my MDS instance to work. I wasn’t sure if the instructions were off or if it was my machine, so I decided to try spinning up another machine in Azure to practice along with the EDX courses. (Spoiler: there are windows features I did not add to my instance that were missed in the 767 book but were covered in the EDX course.) I was able to use the EDX courses to set up my local machine afterward, but I decided to continue along on Azure for fun and experience. (It cost me $7 out of my $200 free trial to complete both EDX courses over the course of two weeks.)
In the first pass-through of the practice exam I received a 56%, this really outlined where my gaps were. (Surprise, mostly DQS and MDS.) There were some other areas that were more difficult than I anticipated though. Particularly: SSIS deployment models and Columnstore Index design. There were a lot of good questions though and it definitely felt like I got refreshed on some concepts in SSIS, indexes, dimension design, and partitioning.
The practice exam had a feature where you can select X questions to attempt that you have not seen in the last Y amount of tests. I used this to cover every question in the practice exam via short bursts. (Usually groups of 10-20 questions.) I continued using the practice exam until I was achieving 85% or greater on average when attempting certification mode.
I also read through SQL Server Integration Services Design Patterns and The Data Warehouse Toolkit, but this was more to re-affirm my knowledge. I think the practice exam, EDX courses, and exam book were the best supplemental pieces of knowledge outside of my experience.
If I had less experience with indexes, warehousing, SSIS, change tracking/change data capture, partitioning, and modeling, this would have been an extremely difficult test to study for, given the topics Microsoft chose.
If you are scrambling to achieve this certification before they expire and you run into this post, good luck and happy studying!
