I’m currently preparing for 70-473 Design and Implement Cloud Data Platform Solutions exam, so I’ve decided to compile a list of resources which may be useful to prepare for this exam. I’m going to append it with additional materials as I keep working on my preparation and I hope it may be useful to other test takers.
As with any MSFT exam your starting point has to be MSFT exam description page which contains run down of all exam topics as well as links to additional resources, so here it is – Exam 70-473 Designing and Implementing Cloud Data Platform Solutions. You should keep in mind that though this exam has been released in December 2015, it is being updated quarterly, so once in a while you need to check exam page to see if any new topics were added there. At the moment last update to this exam was made in June 2017 and changes are explained in exam 70-473 change document.
Paid resources:
70-473 Cloud Data Platform Solutions course by SoftwareArchitect.ca – this is an affordable (25$) online course which I bought and used during my preparation – good overview of all concepts at a fair price, and when I searched it was only 70-473 specific course from online training vendors which I was able to find. Author goes through all the “skills measured” topics as they stated in exam description. What I dislike about this course is amount of typos and some little issues like mismatch between numbering and naming of videos in course navigation pane and inside of the videos themselves. One exactly the same video even inserted/listed twice there. So I would describe it as lack of QA/editing problem. My other complain would be lack of hands-on demos, there are some of them in the course but I wanted more. 🙂 Only after completion of the course I found that it is also available on Udemy and there it was priced 9,99$ with discount when I checked – so check both locations and compare prices if you want to try it.
Free resources and video recordings:
Second link is YouTube video, looks like both of these links cover more or less the same material and delivered by the same person, yet YouTube session has newer slides, it seems, and they are not absolutely identical – so watch both of them.
Channel 9 – Keeping Sensitive Data Secure with Always Encrypted
YouTube – Secure your data in Azure SQL Database and SQL Data Warehouse
MSFT documentation:
Resolving Transact-SQL differences during migration to SQL Database
This article covers things which will work in SQL queries run on on-prem SQL Server while won’t work while run against Azure SQL DB. For example things you probably discovery very quickly is that USE statement is not supported.
Azure SQL Database – Controlling and granting database access
Article explains unrestricted administrative accounts, server-level administrative roles and non-administrator users + “access paths”.
Sizes for Windows virtual machines in Azure
General purpose virtual machine sizes
High performance compute VM sizes
You may expect questions around VM sizing based on given requirements so need to remember which series has premium storage and which not along with some other things which you can learn from the articles above.
Always Encrypted (Database Engine)
This article explains 2 very important things you should be aware of: key storage options and Always Encrypted Terms.
SQL Database dynamic data masking
Azure SQL has loads of security features and you supposed to know them all 🙂 At least when to use, along with requirements and limitations.
Azure Cosmos DB: SQL API getting started tutorial
Get started with Azure Table storage and the Azure Cosmos DB Table API using .NET