Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Engineer Associate

With some pride I can announce that Today I passed the DP203 Exam and became a Microsoft Certified Azure Data Engineer Associate!

For the loyal followers of my blog this shouldn’t come as a surprise, as I already announced that I was moving on to this exam next in my earlier post. I must say that this was one of the hardest exams I ever took in the Microsoft space.

The topics for the exams are outlined as following by Microsoft:

• Design and implement data storage (40—45%)
• Design and develop data processing (25—30%)
• Design and implement data security (10—15%)
• Monitor and optimize data storage and data processing (10—15%)

But just the sheer amount of possibilities and products that are available in above areas in the Microsoft space, and that I’m still mostly working on-premises with more legacy tooling in the space made it hard to learn and grasp for me.

Tools

I used the same tools as described earlier, so I won’t be going over them again. Just a note, A-Cloud-Guru alone is not enough. They cover items that is not referenced in the Microsoft Learn topics, and vice-versa. So if you only want to get the certification the Microsoft Learn paths are maybe a better bet. With that said, the A cloud guru touches on items that help you if you start working as an actual data engineer!

Azure Products and languagues

The exam and its learning materials cover a whole lot of tooling, mostly:

• Azure Storage
• Azure Databricks
• Azure Synapse Analytics
• Azure Data factory

The languages differ between good old SQL, but also more big data related languages as python and sparc. The languages are used directly or even notebooks. You’ll learn how to provision the resources and secure them, and using them in the various tools list above.

Conclusion

In the end I’m just really happy that I earned the certification in a 2 month period.

Next up is probably the recertification of the Microsoft Certified: Azure Database Administrator Associate. This one experes coming March and this is the one I really want to keep. I’m happy that it doesn’t require a complete new exam, but there is a renew option available on Microsoft learn. Hopefully more on this subject in the new year.

I wish you all happy holidays and a great start to the new year!