December 16, 2013 at 8:08 am
I passed my 70-461 exam on 14th Dec. This is my first time writing anything on SQLservercentral.com.....All the questions, experiences, discussions going on here has always helped me so I thought I would share my experience as well ... It might just motivate someone. Here is my preparation experience
Background: I had around a year of experience with sql server (any version) and was somewhat familiar with writing stored procedure, functions, views, triggers and troubleshooting data issues.
I started preparing with just the training kit and measure up exam. I spent time understanding the concepts and practicing the tests. But I did not go through all the exercises and therefore failed the exam (625/1000).
I thought to myself okay so that wasn't too bad , let me fill the gaps in the knowledge so that I can do better in my exams next time. So before I appeared for the exam the second time, I practiced every single concept/topic multiple times. I made simple questions for myself and then solve it in two three methods. For example how will I solve the same thing with a subquery, function, stored procedure. Someone suggested I should study Joes to pros along with the training kit. And that really helped. Joes to pros has these exercises to follow along which makes you practice the material as you go through the chapter. There are bug catcher (slide show) type game which really makes you practice reading the text carefully to find bugs in it. I practiced everything and then whatever I could not understand properly for those topics I used books online. I read 3 volumes of Joes 2 Pros non-stop , and suddenly felt that this cannot be enough. So I bought transcender exams and started going through them. My score on transcender was bad constantly.... 40% 39% 50% and such. But Transcender explanations are really good quality. So each time i scored bad I read up all the explanations carefully.With all that I started feeling really confident.
On the day of the exam I slept 8 hours and ate well ... Whenever I did not knew the exact answer to a question , I tried to eliminate the obvious wrong answers and shortlist the best answer choices. After all with just one year of experience and few months of self study I can't possibly know every thing ... so I read questions twice and read all the answers thrice. I was totally shocked to see the "Congratulations ! " message in the end. 🙂 .... (Scored exactly 700) 😀
At the end of the day whatever book you use , whatever tests you take , its the practice that will get you ahead. So keep practicing people ! Just keep filling the gaps in the knowledge each day. Good Luck !
December 16, 2013 at 9:27 am
Congrats, and thanks for the notes.
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