February 16, 2012 at 6:29 am
After a few attempts, I have finally passed the 70-450. Much more difficult than I expected but its done now.
Just want to thank the folks on this forum for all the help, in particular GilaMonster and SQLRNNR. Really appreciate all the effort you put into helping folks on these forums.
For anyone who would like to know the materials used, they were, in order of usage:
1. Books Online (including but not limited to lots of articles from SQLRNNR's post here[/url]).
2. Practical Experince and doing practical examples where no oppertunity to gain real world experience existed (particularly for things like partitioning, backup/restore, security/encryption).
3. Lots of questions to my boss who is a SQL Guru.
4. MeasureUp sample exams - really good. Similar experience to the real exams.
5. Asking questions here when something just was not clicking and trying it out didnt help.
6. MCM Videos located here.
7. Trancender - Not particularly useful. Question format and content was quite abit off from that of the real exams. Question wording was not great also, often very ambiguous was much too simple also. Trancender questions for the 432 and 450 are also virtually identical.
February 16, 2012 at 6:42 am
February 16, 2012 at 6:44 am
Thanks! just updated the first post with a high level overview of what i studied for the exam.
Regarding the exam. its quite tough. I dont find it as valuable as it could be. My main problems with it were:
1. A lot of the questions offer 4 answers, none of which are the answer you would chose in a real world scenario. They are asking you for the best answer, given the answer choices. Ok, this does test you to some degree, but in the realworld i would always use the best, recommended way of doing things, as opposed to the 2nd best or 3rd best way.
2. Some are not worded in the best way also. quite ambiguous. I dont see room for ambiguity. In the real world if someone asked me to do something and was that ambiguous, id probe for further info until I knew exactly what the problem was and so i could make a good call on the solution (cant give any example questions unfortunately, its against rules). I expect the same standard of detail from questions in a Microsoft certified exam.
Overall though, via the process of studying for the exam I learned an awful lot i did not previously know.
February 16, 2012 at 7:13 am
Very cool. Congratulations!
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
February 16, 2012 at 7:23 am
Really great Winston, Congratulations!
M&M
February 20, 2012 at 11:17 pm
im preparing for the 70-433, what was your prior experience with SQL
February 21, 2012 at 6:21 am
Congrats Winston!
Need an answer? No, you need a question
My blog at https://sqlkover.com.
MCSE Business Intelligence - Microsoft Data Platform MVP
February 21, 2012 at 7:08 am
kareemking (2/20/2012)
im preparing for the 70-433, what was your prior experience with SQL
70-433 is a very different exam, and im not a dedicated database developer ( i will be sitting this exam in the comming months though).
My background - I have 5-6 years of various jobs where i always worked with SQL Server to a greater or lesser degree, and am a dedicated SQL Server DBA with dev responsibilities for the past year.
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