This blog was authored by: Yvonne Hawley, Senior Consultant, Telefónica Tech

I’d like to share my study tips for the DP-600 Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate exam which I passed in May 2024. This will include: the resources I used to study, available labs and discounts. I was lucky enough to attend free training and earn a 100% discount voucher for the exam, I will share how you can qualify for these discounts.

Microsoft Fabric Learning Resources

This Fabric exam is based on the DP-500 Power BI exam which is now retired, so any Power BI foundations such as PL-300 and DP-500 and general Power BI experience is really important for this exam.

Below lists the learning resources I used, but like all Microsoft exams this alone is not enough (additional material is covered in the next section).

• DP-600 Exam Overview (any changes are listed in the study guide).
• Microsoft learn, 11 modules and labs, I read through these as my first step.
• I attended the free Azure Depth Fabric training in February, this was 4 half days of teaching and labs, the labs were invaluable for getting hands on with Fabric, and I highly recommend this course.
• Microsoft Cloud skills challenge, the material was based on the Microsoft learn modules that I’d mostly already completed, so this was a quick win to register and complete the challenge for a 100% exam discount voucher.
• Microsoft Fabric Learn Together x 8 recap videos. I watched these videos in the week leading up to the exam, they were a good recap. It was a nice surprise that they featured some of the people I’d met while volunteering at SQLBits 2024 such as Heidi Hasting and Cathrine Wilhelmsen.
• Learn Microsoft Fabric with Will Needham, I registered for this, but only about a week before taking the exam, I found it was similar to the Fabric Learn Together videos. It is a really great community consisting of recap videos with support and knowledge sharing on the forum. It is a more interactive experience that the Learn Together series, also providing community feedback on exam experiences (I wasn’t the only one with technical issues, more on this later!) and new feature releases, so you could choose which of these resources best fits your needs.
• Fabric notes includes a few diagrams that are useful for recap.
• Exam Cram part of the Microsoft Fabric Learn Together

Data Engineering Foundations

The scope of the exam is quite broad and the Fabric exam syllabus is only part of the knowledge required. I do feel that you need prior data engineering experience, these are other areas of experience I feel really helped during the exam. If you haven’t completed these certifications yet, I would at least cover some of the study material and take the practice tests to gauge your skill level. I’ve also provided links to blogs that cover some of these areas.

• Power BI: and DAX are heavily featured along with optimisation, there’s a great series of articles by our colleague Laz on Power BI optimisation which I recommend.
• Azure Data Engineering (DP-203): sql, dimensional modelling/Kimball/star schemas, slowly changing dimensions, optimisation, windows functions/partition over, aggregates and keeping up-to-date with new sql functions.
• Cluster optimisation: The Fabric study resources cover notebooks, sql and python syntax for reading/writing data but little on configuration and optimisation. I feel the Databricks training material covers the generic concepts around delta lakes, clusters and cluster optimisation more thoroughly. It’s useful to understand the concepts of MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) and the 5 S’s: Spill, Skew, Shuffle, Storage, Serialization along with concepts such as optimisation, partitioning and broadcast joins.

DP-600 Study Tips

• As well as the Fabric study material and foundations above, it’s really important to get hands on with Fabric for the exam. I was lucky to attend the Azure Depth Fabric training in February, the labs were really useful and I completed them all. I also participated in a Fabric Hackathon the same month, to create an interactive game for our SQLBits 2024 stand (my next blog will cover this). You can also get a 60 day free Fabric trial, and complete these Fabric exercises.
• There is an official 50 question practice test, this is free and available from the exam outline page. I would advise repeating until you are consistently getting over 80%. I took this test about 8 times and it is a good indicator of areas you need to brush up on and when you’re ready to take the exam. There’s some other good resources out there such as on YouTube, sharing topics to cover such as the Will Needham videos, just be wary of other unofficial practice tests and questions, some are definitely dodgy and claim to be real questions, so you want to steer clear of those. With the official practice test, your previous attempts are stored and you can drill into the detail. The detail shows scoring in the same 4 categories as the exam. My exam scoring followed the same trends. You can also review the answers from the practice tests, all questions have a link to the relevant topic in Microsoft learn. There’s useful study hints based on your weaker areas and you can save these modules to your Microsoft Learn profile.

DP-600 Exam Tips

• There are various places to get exam discounts, if your company is a Microsoft partner you can often acquire discounts through your Alliances and Partner Manager. Discounts are also available from Microsoft training and challenges. The Azure Depth Fabric training I completed in February awarded you a 50% exam voucher. The Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenges have been awarding 50% to 100% exam discount for various exams. The March/April 2024 challenge provided a 100% voucher which I used for my exam. Check the links above for the latest training and challenges.
• Time management is key and you only have 100 minutes for the exam, not the 120 minutes I expected, to answer between 40 to 60 questions. Be aware of the number of questions and your remaining time. I had questions in 3 sections: case study, main section and yes/no final section. When you finish the first case study section you can’t return, you can review questions in the second section. Leave time as there is a third section of 5 or so yes/no questions at the end. There are many reports on the Learn Microsoft Fabric forum of people running out of time and having technical issues, so time management is key.
• I took the exam proctored and I had quite a few technical issues including: next and previous buttons disappeared, the review screen didn’t take me to the correct question number and not being able to drag an answer to drag/drop areas. From reading on the Learn Microsoft Fabric forum, I wasn’t the only one having issues. There was some discussion about it being new proctoring software, one way to avoid this is to take the exam in a test center, I would also close the Microsoft Learn window if you are experiencing page rendering issues, this seemed to resolve my issues. If all else fails you can contact your proctor.
• Microsoft exams don’t just cover the exam material they will be checking for a depth of knowledge in Data Engineering. I have detailed topics that it’s useful to have covered for the exam in the Data Engineering Foundations Personally I would take the official practice tests for PL-300, DP-203 and maybe even the Databricks Data Engineer Associate before the Fabric exam, if this highlights any weaker areas then include those in your study. I feel that covering just the Fabric material isn’t enough to pass this exam.
• Microsoft Learn is now available on Associate and above exams (not fundamentals), personally I would run through the questions quickly in the main section first and answer everything without using Microsoft Learn. Flag questions for review, then revisit those after a first run through and use Microsoft Learn if required, otherwise you could waste time just on one question and not finish the exam. Before the exam I did spend some time navigating Microsoft Learn for topics I thought I might need to look up such as DAX functions, query folding and more obscure SQL functions, so I could find them quickly in the exam.

Conclusion

My experience of the exam was that it was quite difficult due to the broad subject matter and the time constraint, I would say it’s slightly more difficult than DP-203 and Databricks Data Engineer Professional. My main advice is that the Fabric training material alone is not enough to pass this exam, refer to the Data Engineering Foundations section for other topics you will need to cover. Repeat the practice test until you can’t face doing it again, make use of the available discount vouchers and give it a try, with 50% discount the exam is less than £65.

This is actually my first blog. So I’d love to hear if this helped you with your Fabric study and certification, or if there’s any other study resources you would recommend. I feel the exam was quite tricky and hope these tips helped. Let us know you’ve passed too!