DataStage Certification - how to pass the exam

 I am officially a certified DataStage something or other. After two hours sitting in a small biege room using nothing but a mouse I picked up an 88% score and certification.

Now I have a headache. It was tougher then I expected, I was hoping to have an educated guess at the 25% of questions I wouldn't know. That's the great thing about multiple choice. However this was evil multiple choice. Which two answers is correct? Which three answers are correct? You've got to guess right more then once on these questions.

Signing Up
I went to the Prometric web site, picked IBM off the list, then found the 000-415 exam on the long list of IBM exams. Here is a tip, they are sorted by exam number! There was a AUS$276 but IBM might reimburse me under "You Pass We Pay" partner plan. I believe it is US$100 in the US and prices in other parts of the world range between the two.

I had four testing centres in Melbourne to choose from, each with different days and different sessions, one test site (Monash Uni where I graduated many years ago) would not load. I chose the only one with Thursday afternoon exams.

Test Preparation
I booked an afternoon test so I could spend the morning studying. That was really dumb, I should have booked a midnight test to fit in the studying I needed. I read up on the following doco:
- Parallel Job Advanced Developers Guide
* environment variables (APT_) they recommend you change.
* Buildops and custom stages.
- Parallel Job Developers Guide
* Read up on the partitioning types I never use (modulus).
* Took a quick look through the enterprise DB stages I never use.
* Tried to find some doco on orchdbadmin as I had never heard of it.
* Configuration files and node pools.
(That's the great thing about certification, it's filled in a few gaps).
- Server Job Developers Guide
* Refresher on the command line interface dsjob, dssearch and dsadmin.
- Designer Guide
* Ah ha, found the orchdbadmin in here.
* Read up on any sequence job stages I don't normally use.
* Make sure you know your stage variable uses
* Environment and project specific variables.
- Installation Guide
* Had a quick read of kernel settings as it's in the objectives. The test whammed me with a doosy of a kernel question.
* Read up on USS deployment as it's in the objectives though there was no sign of it in the test.

Taking the test
Lucky I wore the brown underpants, three quarters of the way through and I didn't think I would pass. Every second question seemed to be about configuration files! There are a lot of developers out there who never play with config files as it gets setup for them at installation time. There also seemed to be an unholy obsession with sorting. Luckily I'd spent a lot of my study time looking at the different ways a job can sort and it certainly helped in the test.

There are 75 questions, most of them are multiple choice and at least half require the selection of 2 or 3 correct answers from 4 or 5 provided. This makes it harder to guess your way through. There were several good questions with pictures, a couple with pictures of Director logs, a couple with pictures of a job where you had to fill in the blanks. I hope they can expand on those type of questions in future tests.

The ratio of questions matches the test objectives on the IBM website.

After one pass through I felt like I was 50% right with forty minutes left. I had marked about 15 questions I didn't think I had right. On the second pass through I counted the questions I was 100% confident about and came up with 19 questions that I felt I had an outside chance of getting. I spent more time on those questions.

The final score was 88%. I got 6 out of 11 database questions wrong, which accounted for about 8% of my errors. So I did quite well in all other categories with only one or two questions wrong.

What did I get wrong?
Didn't spend enough time learning each of the enterprise database stages and load options. I have a very good knowledge of DB2 Enterprise and a passing knowledge of Teradata Enterprise. They just kept firing Oracle Enterprise questions at me!!!

Was also too shallow on my knowledge of installation and configuration files.

There were three questions I didn't think I could get right as they didn't make sense.

Dodgy Questions
I felt there were three questions in my set that did not make sense. There was one on sequence jobs where I had to pick 3 of the 5 options and any way I looked at it only two of them were right. And I know sequence jobs quite well.
There were a couple questions that had technical jargon that obscured the question and didn't relate well to real life use of the product. I think some plain English could be introduced into some questions. I feel sorry for the English as a second language student.

It's this language barrier that makes me think the visual design questions should be increased and the wordy theory questions reduced.

The Wrap
Overall the test was harder then I expected. I felt they ignored a lot of everyday use stages and focussed a lot of optimisation (config files, sorting etc) whereas I would like to see more job design questions.

Free Question
Okay, here is one of the exam questions, couldn't let you go without a sneak peak.

How many certified DataStage developers does it take to change a lightbulb?
a) I only know one and he's too lazy to change a lightbulb.
b) Each developer can change one lightbulb per parallel node, with combined operators turned on they can also change the smoke alarm battery.
c) This joke started off lame and is now just downright embarrassing.
d) Two of the above answers are right but the other two are wrong.


Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.