The DP-900 certification and exam - Azure Tutorial

- [Instructor] I'd like to start by talking a little bit about the certification itself and what you should expect from the exam and, therefore, this course. Microsoft tends to follow a somehow consistent convention when it comes to naming their exams, which helps you in understanding what to expect in terms of knowledge area and level of difficulty. Microsoft has three main levels of certifications. Fundamentals, Associate and Expert. They do have a Specialty level, but it's for very specific workloads, such as IoT or (indistinct). So let's focus on these three main categories for now. First, we have the Fundamentals level, with exams that generally end with 900, such as DP-900 or AZ-900. You can expect the certifications to be quite entry-level and cover just general concepts without digging too much into technical details. Then, we have the Associate certifications. The numbering here is a bit more flexible, but most of them will end with 100 or 200, such as DP-200 or AI-102. These certifications are for professionals with around two years of experience on the product. So they're far more technical than the Fundamental ones. Finally, we have the Expert level certifications, such as Azure DevOps Engineer, exam AZ-400, and Solutions Architect, exams AZ-300 and AZ-301. These exams have the highest level of technical difficulty and the corresponding prestige. The prefix also matters as it defines the area of knowledge. For example, DP for data platform, AI for artificial intelligence, or AZ for Azure. The DP-900 exam pretty much matches these definitions. It's an entry-level certification, so it focuses more on what the technology can do. You shouldn't expect any coding questions or questions that require you to decide which button or option to click on. As for the data platform technologies covered, there's a high focus on the relational and non-relational databases, modern data warehouse, reporting, specifically Power BI, as well as tools for ingesting and processing the data, such as Azure Data Factory, Databricks and HDInsight. I have designed this course to match these exam requirements. Therefore, we will not focus too much on coding implementation here, especially because, with over 20 data platform technologies covered on the exam, it would be impractical to talk about each one of them in detail, and we will, however, be doing some demos to help you understand the technology potential and I will add some references to other courses on the LinkedIn library, in case you want to know more details about the specific technologies. And what kind of knowledge do you need to bring? Well, to be honest, not much. As I'll cover most of these topics from the beginning. However, I would say that having some Azure, database and development experience could benefit you. With that out of the way, let's start learning some important concepts on the data platform and the Microsoft offerings for it.