I made myself an early Christmas present: since I had a free exam voucher from Microsoft, I said to myself heck, since I’m not paying for the exam, it’s kinda time to upgrade my DBA skills from 2005 to 2008. That is, 70-453.
OK, I passed, but I want to tell you some impressions:
- tough exam
- difficult exam
- not piece of cake exam
Having said that, the main idea is this: it’s actually a combination of 70-432 and 70-450 exams, namely you’ll get around 25 questions from each exam – at least this is what I got from my paper, reporting that I passed both MCTS and MCITP exams:-). In addition, make sure you know the stuff, because they are gonna test your skills, ranging from DMVs all the way to disk subsystem configuration.
The only thing left to be said is the fact that yes, finally, there’s no chance for you to have a single choice question and more than one correct answer. It might seem like, but trust me, it’s not the case. I learned this on my own, as I screwed up some answers to apparently simple questions.
Final word on preparation materials: there’s a little hidden gem on the net, called SQL Server 2008 Jumpstart, which has been turned into free e-clinics on Microsoft e-learning site by now. Believe me, if you already have some SQL Server knowledge and you’re not taking this learning thing from scractch, there’s nothing much that you need besides these videos.
The little much that you need, though, are the (famous by now) “Inside SQL Server 2008” series for SQL Server Development, and the SQL Server 2008 Architecture and Internals, all from MS Press. Of course, you can also read the auhtor’s blogs, which are by all measures far more interesting than mine, but I’m working in that direction:-).
I’ll close with an anecdotical story: I took the test at the same center where I teach SQL Server classes. The guy said: OK, if you fail the exam, at least that was for free. I told him: if I fail this exam, then it means that I did not pay much attention to what the teacher had explained last week, when teaching the administration course.
You can pretty much guess who was the teacher:-)
SQL-PLAY 