FUN FACT: I have been a Microsoft Certified Professional for SQL Server for over 20 years. Second FUN FACT: the last time I took a Microsoft certification exam was 1999. Add these two together and you can probably deduce I had most recently passed exams relating to SQL Server 7.0

Oddly enough, I am 100% sure these facts have no current bearing on my abilities or career prospects.

Anyhow, after contemplating how in 2019 I had completed my university studies (at long last!) and had started presenting sessions relating to SQL Server, I decided the next challenge to tackle would be passing some current Microsoft certification exams. I figured if I am going to be speaking about the subject publicly I should probably see if I needed to fill in some knowledge gaps.

As it turned out preparing and passing the first exam took me just a handful of weeks. If you’ve recently considered taking this exam yourself, let me share with you how I did this.

Hello Hurricane

First off, here’s the bad news: the main thing that helped me pass the exam was my experience. There is no substitute for learning something and applying it with some semblance of regularity. Repetition reinforces abilities. In the immortal words of Allen Iverson, “We talkin’ about practice.”

That said, whether your experience is two years or twenty, if you have used much of the material covered by a given exam (in my case it was “Querying Data with Transact-SQL”) then you certainly can pass an exam following a similar method to what I used.

Here’s the mantra: remember what you already know, and learn (not cram) what you don’t.

Cramming is when you try to learn everything all at once and immediately take an exam before your knowledge falls out of your head, like what many of us did with high school or college subjects we hated. My goal is to try to learn more to become better at what I do, not just pass an exam.

Red Eyes

Anyhow, you can prepare and pass an exam in about a month if you can set aside an hour or so each day. For me, this hour was called “lunch,” although I also spent some extra hours on the weekends preparing. Here was my plan.

Step 1: Buy and read the book. “Querying Data with Transact-SQL” is the official study guide. It is divided into about a dozen “Skills” sections, so what I did was try to read a particular section each day. Aside from the thorough descriptions, Itzik Ben-Gan has some great examples with wonderful explanations for use cases beyond what is covered in the exam. And it doesn’t matter if you learn more; that’s value added!

As I read I highlighted the important points of anything I didn’t already know or had forgotten, read those again for reinforcement, and kept going. If I was confused I’d type out and execute the example queries, which was also great for reinforcement. Going through the book this way took about two weeks.

Step 2: Review your highlighted sections. Next I got a notebook and took a few days to review what I had highlighted. I wrote down notes for roughly one chapter per day, once again reinforcing the things I didn’t know before. If I still felt unsure about any sections (read: XML and JSON) I sought out videos on the subject and watched someone else explain them to me. Assuming you didn’t mark the entire book, the review process takes about three days.

Step 3: Buy the MeasureUp practice exam. I purchased the official practice exam as part of a package. (At the time of this writing Microsoft and Pearson are offering a deal where you can purchase a package with the practice exam, the actual exam, and a replay exam if necessary for basically the cost of the first two items. Given that I hadn’t passed an exam in 20 years, I considered this the replay exam as insurance.)

I went through the practice exam slowly, like 10 questions at a time. Each time I selected the option to not give me questions from the previous exams. After 15-16 times I had seen all of the practice questions.

And here is an important point: I didn’t guess! If didn’t know then I didn’t answer, knowing I could later review any questions I missed. You see, this practice exam has some great explanations and links about why answers are correct or not, so for the questions I missed I took even more notes in my notebook and reviewed the material back in the book. Sometimes my answers were incorrect because I didn’t read the question correctly, but for the most part the indicated the stuff I didn’t know. This part took me about a week.

Step 4: Review your mistakes. After going through all the questions, taking notes, and looking up material I was shaky on, it was time to see how much more I had learned. I started a new round of practice exams with only questions I had missed. This is the part where I started to feel good, as my percentage of correct answers started to rise. Once I had gotten around a 90% success rate for each practice exam I proceeded to the last step. This took me about three days.

Step 5: Schedule the exam. I scheduled the exam two days in advance and took a last bit of time to run through more practice questions, but I never attempted more than 20 at a time. Any more would be undigestible, and I was saving mental energy for the real exam. I was trying to identify any subjects I was still missing to note and review, although I didn’t realistically expect to know everything. At this point, whatever I had left to learn would definitely fall into “cramming,” but since I was getting 90% or better on the practice exams I was somewhat confident I in my actual knowledge.

So when the day came I showed up at the exam center, signed about a thousand things, emptied my person of everything but clothing, and passed the exam on the first try. I’m not going to say anything specific about the questions other than to say the practice exam was a very good indicator of the kinds of questions that were asked.

Free

On the one hand, this all seems a bit simplistic. There is no spreadsheet of subjects, but rather a short list of time-consuming actions. On the other hand, I firmly believe if you are diligent about learning and practicing the things you didn’t already know then you will most likely roll through the exam in less than the allotted time.

A suggestion: I was able to schedule at least an hour every day for about a month, and I realize many readers might not be able to do that. It’s not only difficult to make that kind of time every day, it’s also sometimes difficult to motivate yourself to study that hour. If you find yourself in that situation try reaching out to a coworker or friend to schedule study sessions together. I’ve seen several coworkers align as accountability partners to much success with these exams.

One final note: I’ve started reading for another exam, and the material isn’t edited as well as it was in Ben-Gan’s book. It’s frustrating for sure, but the material is still there. Based on reviews of other books this doesn’t seem uncommon, so don’t let this deter you.

I hope this helps. Best of luck!