September 29, 2010 at 9:30 am
I passed my 70-433 exam yesterday.
Having been a Ms Access developer for over decade I decided to get more into SQL Server.
So I decided to get certified (70-433 exam Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Database Development) even though I didn't have any experience using SQL Server.
This proved to be quite hard. To make things a bit easier I decided to take a course. A self paced course at a training centre. Which meant watching videos for hours and hours (NetG). They also gave me the MOC books. I total I got the 2778A, 6231A and 6232A. After a while I had figured it out: probably about 60% would be part of the exam. Bit of a problem: which 60%. They couldn't tell me at the training centre. I had specifically stated that I wanted to get certified at the beginning but still they couldn't tell me what was important and what wasn't.
The MOC Books proved to be not very good, so I bought the following books as well:
- MCTS Self Paced Training from Microsoft
- The Real MCTS SQL Server 2008 Exam 70-433 Prep Kit
The Microsoft Book also had a CD enclosed with Measure Up questions, the Real MCTS didn'have a cd included.
The measure up questions proved to be way, way to difficult. In fact, I can say now they've got nothing to do with the exam whatsoever!!
The other book had a multiple choice section at the end of each chapter. Those questions where already quite helpful to master or see if you had mastered the most important bits. In addition there where couple of additional chapters online about topics they had forgotten about. In hindsight I can tell you that was no real need for that. I can say now that this book was the best by far, although on XML it's missing a few bits (CBT Nuggets proved to be quite helpful here).
In addition I bought the Transcender kit, which proved to be quite useful. Every time I got a question wrong I would look up info in my books and Google it.
And last but not least I managed to get a SQL Server project, which helped as well. I am a freelancer and the deal was that I would do it for free.
I hope some of you find my story useful. It is possible to get certified without having proper practical experience, but it's not easy. Do you need a training center for this? I would definitely help, however I paid for it myself and then it is a whole lot of money especially if the trainer's best answer is "uuuhm, may be you can google it......"
Henk
October 4, 2010 at 2:53 pm
congrats!
October 5, 2010 at 6:34 am
grats on the cert! well done.
I'm currently going throught a book to eventually take the exam. How long did it take you to study?
October 6, 2010 at 3:00 am
Way too long. That is: it could have been a lot shorter, as you can read in my previous post.
It took me about three months.
If time is critical: Focus on what is needed. I didn't do that too well until the very end.
A lot of the stuff I studied/watched/labs was not part of the actual exam objectives. Partially I knew that after a couple of weeks and partially I figured it out at about the end of the course.
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