Hi,
looking for any tips on how to make the price of these exams cheaper. Currently $113 for a student, has anyone else made these exams cheaper. Looking to do 3-4 over next month or two.
thanks
Microsoft exams
Donaldhump on 16/03/2016 - 19:40
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Cheapest you'll get them down to is $99 if you buy via an IT Academy program member school.
also check out this offer
http://www.mindhub.com/-a/249.htm?q=microsoft+vouchers
This probably doesn't apply to you, but if you're already in a job then get your employer to pay for them.
yeh im not working so no good, cant even claim on tax i dont think
I always claim the fees for updating my certifications under "self education" as it's relevant to my job. I don't think that applies to new careers unfortunately. Probably best not to risk it incase you get audited. The ATO love to audit IT professionals including myself ;)
not a new career just changing from oracle/postgressql to microsoft… i dont beleive u can claim it if ur not actually working… but who knows…. not a big deal really.
Just keep in mind that the BI tools and functions of SQL Server are changing pretty dramatically in SQL Server 2016 which is in Release Candidate now and is due for release in a few months.
SQL 2012 and 2014 are very similar, but 2016 adds a lot of difference in the BI and DB space and a lot of companies are going to be pushing for these skills (realtime operational analytics, R integration, Hadoop integration, PowerBI and tabular models). So be prepared to upskill quickly to keep yourself relevant for the next few years.
thanks, my prob is i am oracle/ unix, and everyone wants MS. i feel like these exams prob wont help much, but will learn lots doing them
Yeah MS is being super aggressive in the data space with no sign of slowing down.
The certification will help, but getting practical experience is really vital. You can get SQL Server 2016 RC0 for free on a 180 day trial and you can combine it with Visual Studio Community Edition (free) and SQL Server Data Tools (free) which will give you full access to a SQL environment you can mess around with.
Or if you want to tackle the admin side of things you can get some free Azure credits (on sign up) and spin up a SQL 16 VM image in a matter of minutes.
When looking for tech specific people I always value experience over certification. Throw some projects together and learn by doing, play around in PowerBI and some free datasets.
These techs are all relatively new but will get wide uptake in the coming years so some experience will put you at the head of the pack.
yes i have made a transaction system, datawarehouse, etl setup… i hae done all this in oracle for 20 years, going from one to the other is 90% the same, a dw still has the same model underneath, and i have seen some shit ones over the years..
ssis is easy, lacks tonnes of functionality though
ssas is simple,
ssrs yet to doi havent used azure, i have used aws for 2 years, and its eay at a high level
all the same stuff, just a different database/tool
everyone uses MS because its cheap, i prefer oracle anyday, but is going down the tube due to costs
everyone uses MS because its cheap, i prefer oracle anyday, but is going down the tube due to costs
It's going to get worse too - MS is offering free licenses to any organisation using Oracle on a one-to-one basis for MSSQL Server '16. So if you have 20 Oracle licenses, you can get 20 free SQL Server licenses.
Oracle is awesome (the DB side of things, can't say I'm a fan of the OBI stuff) but they've just failed to stay competitive price-wise and their cloud delivery isn't as compelling as AWS or Azure.
i hae done all this in oracle for 20 years
With that level of experience you shouldn't really need that much vendor experience. Your practical experience would outweigh the MS certification by a mile!
Good luck with it!
@the-mal: thanks, not in a rush really… every recruites says i have no experience in SSIS, for **** sake, i did datastage for years and that tool is hard as hell to understand
yes oracles BI products are garbage…
datastage license 250 k for 3 years
oracle 100k+ for a yearms i think was 25-50k everything included
If you need to just fudge some MS experience on your resume. Most recruiters will have no idea how transferable the skills are and as you'd be aware SSIS is childsplay (and you'll likely do what most do and export most of the ETL to stored procs and just use SSIS for control flow since a lot of the components suck performance-wise).
If I were you I'd have a play around with the MS SQL products at home and then just take some liberty with your resume. With a few decades experience you'll have zero trouble hitting the ground running - as you said 90%+ of the skills are directly transferable.
Technical recruiters…I tell you! So many of them are so bad.
cheers thanks for the tip
@the-mal:
i dont see the purpose of an etl tool if is just launching stored procs.. defeats purpose of them, for their metadata. i don't even like having etl tools do the data flow… seen places where 60 jobs will be one flow, and the next 30 need to wait for the entire 60 jobs to finish.but say 1 job in the second 30 can run as soon as the first 5 in first 60 are finished this is wasting time. Every job should be launched asap, at the same giving them a priority and limiting the number jobs launched at any time. priority 0 jobs will launch regardless of load. other jobs can be set to start at 4am during quiet times or so.
i like just configuring jobs/packages in a table, and have a master scheduler script/package/job whatever loop and launch jobs asap while keep the number of jobs running to a predefined limit. Also keep dependencies in a tables too.
so many places have sequential processing too… i don't get the design
i have written the below logic in shell, python, datastage, ssis, informatica…no control flow in a tool
just controlled by db tables… launches things ASAP.master script/package start at midnight
jobs_to_run=get_jobs_list_to_run # some query into the db, with limits,priorities etc.
while jobs_to_run.count>0 loop
for job in jobs_to_run loop
run_job job & # background mode
sleep 1
end
sleep 10
jobs_to_run=get_jobs_list_to_run
endrun_job, invoked multiple times in parallel
JOB=$1
insert record into stats table
res=$1
if res==0
update record in stats table as success
elif res==-1
update record in stats table as wait
else
update record in stats table as fail
end
Can I ask which exams you are taking?