Today I took the Implementing Analytics Solutions Using Microsoft Fabric exam and in this blogpost I’ll write about my experiences and feelings. There are other blogposts out there for you to read and compare experiences. Remember that all of these are personal views on the exams and opinions can differ.
Preparation
There’s no way you’ll pass any exam without any form of preparation. For me, I dug into the MS Learn content and the blogs of Nikola Ilic and Kevin Chant. These provided some extra context to most subjects. The learn content provides a lot of subjects you need to know about and the labs offer you options to practice and try things out. It’s an excellent starting point but I would advise you to use the Fabric Lakehouse, Warehouse, Semantic Models, PowerBI reports, external tools and all the other options to get a feel for what they are and what they can do. There’s no substitute for experience. It will help you in understanding the questions and working your way to the answers.
Exam difficulty
It’s always hard to compare difficulties between exams. But let’s give it a go. For me the fundamental exams are the easiest. I’m not saying they’re very easy though!
The more specialist exams are next (Administering Microsoft Azure SQL Solutions (DP-300) and Azure Administrator (AZ-104) for instance) followed by the next level of specialisation like Azure Security Engineer Associate (AZ-500) and Azure Data Engineer Associate (DP203). These four are about the same level, even though the Azure Administrator is quite broad. Broad in the sense that there are a lot of different topics and technologies you need to know about.
Then we have the expert level exams where I took the Azure Solutions Architect (AZ-305). For me, this was the hardest as there are a number of resources I hardly use in my daily job. Without hands-on experience on Kubernetes clusters for instance, the questions are quite theoretical.
Where to put this exam? I think it’s a little more complicated than the Data Engineer (DP-203) but not as complicated as the Architect (AZ-305).
Exam questions
If you were hoping I would tell you anything about the questions you’ll get, think again. Of course there’s the standard NDA at the beginning of the exam and I’m not willing to break it. I think it is safe to say that I got 59 questions and they all had a lot to do with Fabric. Almost every moving part was touched in some way, some more than others. My guess is that there’s a question pool of around 150 questions that can be asked, some harder than others although it depends on your speciality if they’re hard or not.
As the exam is in preview, my feedback on the questions was mostly on syntax (some scripts would never run because of errors), or vagueness of questions. There was one question that I spent 5 minutes on just trying to figure out where the link was between the context of the question and the answers.
Microsoft Learn
Contrary to what Nikola did when he took his exam, I did dig into the MS Learn content, just to see how it works, if it works and what links you get.
If you know what to search for, it might help you. Every now and then you might get a link that would lead you outside of ms learn, these are blocked! Yes, I tried of course! So the only content you’re allowed to read is on the learn site. It did help me with some questions but you will not have the time to do this for each question. My advice is to mark the questions you have to look up and start doing that after you’ve answered (or looked at) all the other questions. Try and make a note of the ‘quick checks’ and do those first. Try and leave the ones that might take the most time for last. And if you’re like me, try and hold yourself back from reading through the docs and learning during your exam. There are so many fun rabbit holes to dive into…
Result
Now, did I pass or not. No idea. I’m feeling a bit more confident then before the exam but other than that it’s really hard to judge. The result will be sent at a maximum of two weeks after the exam’s live publication date. As I haven’t seen that date (at the time of writing) I don’t know when I’ll get the result. I’ll add it here when the result arrives.
Finally
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