DP-600 in perspective of study guide update

21h ago (edited) in DP-600

Hi everyone,

I was thinking for the last couple days about a post on this topic, as I was personally really concerned about the change in the study guide that took place on the 15th of November (I took an exam a week after). Like, what exactly has changed? Does deletion of pyspark mean increase in expected proficiency of SQL, or rather DAX? If Real-Time Intelligence (RTI) is not a part of the examination, why should I know KQL? Since admin governance has been almost completely deleted, what should I still need to know in that regard?

To get one thing out of the way: I believe it still doesn't hurt to know a bit about all Fabric tools/experiences, even if it is more of an "overview" (Data Science is probably the exception and can be ommited). I got 1 or 2 pyspark questions in my exam, but they were general. Same with capacities - I got one question there, relatively general as well (not sure even which of these were graded, as MS continuously assess "psychometrics" by including some questions that are still in test phase). I heard some people had RTI-related questions, even though it is out of the study guide for quite some time. So, focus on study guide, but have an overview of all the Fabric infrastructure, even if it means that you know it exists and have basic knowledge how it works.

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Now the "perspective":

I believe that it is important to look from a higher vantage on 3 exams: DP-700 DP-600 and PL-300. While PL-300 remains a PBI-centered exam and will most likely stay constant due to maturity of PBI and a vast userbase, I believe DP-exams are evolving to create a sort of spectrum for "Fabric other than PBI". Evolving is key here: DP-500 and DP-600 (till November 15th) were sort of "Fabric-all" middle-level examinations, that tried to cover pretty much everything apart from data science. Due to the scope, questions had to be relatively general.

My (subjective) guess is that with the rollout of DP-700 (still in beta) Microsoft is shifting DP-600 to be more analytical in scope. Admin governance, PySpark and RTI were moved to DP-700.

But what does it mean for DP-600? Probably only MS knows, but this is what I noticed:

The abundance of SQL questions. I was surprised, because I got one question after another on SQL; I would also assess them as medium in difficulty (joins that were not obvious, stored procedure syntax, etc.). I had no KQL, two DAX questions (was expecting much more), also couple from M-language. Overall though, SQL was clearly dominating.

Strong focus on security in terms of governance (which kind of makes sense, because this is what they state in the study guide).
In terms of data engineering, biggest focus was on ingesting and modelling. Little transformation from my perspective, but of course there was some. Ingesting was consistent with the study guide, modelling leaned more toward concepts than, for example, DAX (again, I was expecting more in terms of measures, calculated columns, modelling functions)
In terms of other required skills, not that much has changed from my perspective.

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Hopefully it is going to be helpful to somebody. And please DON'T QUOTE ME ON THAT :-) Maybe I just had a very strange draw of questions and the whole "perspective" is some BS.

I will use this post to thank

@Will Needham

for everything he has done for Fabric users! Your videos (btw guys, watch them if you haven't, I don't think they are that outdated), this community and Dojo, are pretty much top of the game among available resources.

Best regards,

Jakub

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