Sunday, April 8, 2012

71-467 Review, Design Business Intelligence Solutions w/MS SQL Server 2012 - 071-467

I was one of the first fortunate people to take the 071-467 beta exam (Design Business Intelligence Solutions w/MS SQL Server 2012), using the free SQL 2012 Beta vouchers.

Check this link to see what's covered in the exam and get idea of what I'll be talking about
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?id=70-467

As the name of the exam states, Design Business Intelligence Solutions w/MS SQL Server 2012, it was mostly about every business intelligence product that Microsoft has, you need to be familiar with a variety of tools, starting down from Excel SSRS, SSIS, SharePoint, PerformancePoint and up to SSAS (Analysis Services) BISM and Tubular modes.

I must admit that exam was hard and I didn't had the wide knowledge for all these tools and not even much experience about SSAS tubular mode.  It uses a totally different approach than any other SQL server exam that I've taken in the past, it consists of 3 separate cases and 31 multiple choices questions.

Each case is a long business scenario about the current business' environment and what's the business requirements, technical requirements and an exhibit of the current business (database table, mart tables or servers layout).

Each case had 7 to 8 questions, you can't go back to the case once you finish answering and reviewing its questions.

The whole exam was 53 questions, after the 3 cases I got 31 questions, mix of the normal known format of the 4 to 5 multiple choices questions that I'm used to, and a new interactive format, these questions had some properties layout and you pull the right relationship or property for an item, just like a drag and drop.

Also some questions asks you on how to do such a thing and you'll get 6 or 7 steps and you need to select whatever applies in the right correct order, note that you don't tell you how many steps you could use !!

Also some questions had 5 to 6 multiple choices and ask you to select all that applies and you could select all of them!! not like before which tells you select 2 or 3 choices!

To recap, my advise to you, don't come near that exam until you really have that wide knowledge of all these technologies and have even some experience in it, it wasn't the easy or pleasant as I thought, I'm already working in BI since 2008 and have MCITP BI 2008! But I'm happy that I had this experience to know what to expect next time I go for the exam.

Well, the good news is that I didn't get the "FAILED" status yet as it's a beta exam and the results will be e-mailed once the live exam is live and available for booking.

practice, study, practice and then book the exam :), hope that helps someone...

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