I'm an MCITP in SQL BI 2008!

I recently took and passed the MCITP: Business Intelligence Developer 2008 certification (exam 70-452).  Obviously I’m not allowed to talk specifically about the exam, but I did have a few thoughts on it after taking it.

For prep I used the Transcender practice exam pretty much exclusively.  I’ve used them in the past, and you really can’t go wrong with their practice tests.  The flashcards are great!  Also the detailed explanations given for each question in the practice exam(s) are really handy.  That said, the Transcender definitely is not exactly like the test, and there were a few questions I felt unprepared for.  For the most part though it covers the areas you’ll need to know.

The biggest thing I noticed about the exam is that it just felt really dated (probably because it is, I shouldn’t have waited so long to take it).  Since SharePoint 2010 came out, SharePoint is such a huge part of what a BI developer does these days.  PerformancePoint, PowerPivot, Excel Services,  etc,  and the configuration(s) that go along with those services just weren’t covered.  All mentions of SharePoint and PerformancePoint were still geared to SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0. 

Another thing I noticed about the exam is that some of the questions were really geared more towards the DBA track in my opinion, particularly around the detailed coverage of db backups.  I also would have expected to see a few more questions surrounding PerformancePoint/SSAS security, as that a topic that comes up almost every time I meet with a client…particularly around dynamic security.

Overall though, I’m really glad to have finally knocked out my first MCITP cert, and will proudly add it to my resume.  In retrospect, I should have taken this test right after I took the MCTS BI test a little over a year ago, but hindsight is 20/20.