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Microsoft Needs Developers for New Data Sciences Beta Exam Testing
Even though this new data sciences exam is aimed at MCSEs, Microsoft Learning is seeking out developers and data scientists to beta test it.
- By Michael Domingo
- 02/01/2017
Microsoft's certification group needs developers and anyone interested in data sciences to try out a new exam that's being beta tested. The beta exam will be made available starting February 17 and will be closed at the end of March.
Dubbed Exam 70-775: Perform Data Engineering on Microsoft Azure HDInsight, the exam
is aimed at MCSEs, but there's still a need for developers and those interested in data sciences to beta test it, accordiing to Liberty Munson, Principal Psychometrician for the Microsoft Learning group, in a blog post. The exam is meant to show skills using "the Microsoft cloud ecosystem to design and implement big data engineering workflows and to use open source technologies for strategic value-add," she writes.
Munson notes in the blog that the beta will be open to 300 testers, who must use a special code that she specifies in her blog. It's a beta exam, so it's free to take (exams are now $165 at Pearson VUE testing centers in the U.S.). As well, exam scores won't be released right after testers take it, but will be available some time after the exam goes live. Those who pass it will have the exam added to their profiles.
According to the exam objective guide, 70-775 has four general areas of coverage:
- Administering and provisioning HDInsight clusters: Deploying, securing and configuring clusters; ingesting cloud and on-premises data; storing data in various Azure data services; managing and debugging HDInsight jobs, with emphasis on YARN.
- Implementing Big Data batch processing solutions: Demonstrate implementation capabilities with Hive and Apache Pig, Spark, a variety of Azure data services, and Hadoop and Apache Oozie, among other technologies.
- Implementing Big Data interactive processing solutions: Show skills using Spark SQL and Spark Dataframes, Hive, and Apache Phoenix on Hbase.
- Implementing Big Data real-time processing solutions: Create Spark apps using DStream API, Apache Storm, Kafka, and Hbase.
The exam guide specifies that it counts toward an MCSE title, but doesn't offer any other details. Interestingly, the guide also doesn't include the MCSD title. We've asked the group to comment and will update that information here.
About the Author
Michael Domingo is a long-time software publishing veteran, having started up and managed several developer publications for the Clipper compiler, Microsoft Access, and Visual Basic. He's also managed IT pubs for 1105 Media, including Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine and Virtualization Review before landing his current gig as Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief. Besides his publishing life, he's a professional photographer, whose work can be found by Googling domingophoto.