One of the most recent Microsoft Azure certification exams is the Designing and Implementing Big Data Analytics Solutions (70-475) exam. It was published on October 27, 2015. Passing this exam will earn you the Microsoft Specialist: Designing and Implementing Big Data Analytics Solutions certification.

There was an update made to the 70-475 Designing and Implementing Big Data Analytics Solutions certification exam, please reference the 70-475 exam Feb. 2017 update post for more information!

EXAM IS RETIRED: This exam is retired June 30, 2019.

Certification Target Audience

The focus of this exam is on Big Data Analytics solutions in Microsoft Azure, and as such the exam is targeted towards data management professionals, data architects, data scientists, and data developers who are designing Big Data Analytics solutions in Microsoft Azure.

Skills Measured

Here is a high level list of the skills and objectives measured on this exam. The percentages next to each represents the number of questions on the exam are in each category.

• Design big data batch processing and interactive solutions (20-25%)
  • Ingest data for batch and interactive processing, design and provision compute clusters, design for data security, design for batch processing, design interactive queries for big data
• Design big data real-time processing solutions (25-30%)
  • Ingest data for real-time processing, design and provision compute resources, design for lambda architecture, design for real-time processing
• Design machine-learning solutions (25-30%)
  • Create and manage experiments, determine when to pre-process or train inside Machine Learning Studio, select input/output types, apply custom processing steps with R and Python, publish web services
• Operationalize end-to-end cloud analytics solutions (25-30%)
  • Create a data factory, orchestrate data processing activities in a data-driven workflow, monitor and manage the data factory, move, transform, and analyze data

Training Materials

Unfortunately, at the time of writing up this summary of the 70-475 Designing and Implementing Big Data Analytics Solutions exam, there isn’t the usual training guide books or practice exams that are generally available for other certification exams. The reason for this is largely due to the fact that it’s a fairly new certification, but also since it’s a little more specialized in its exam objectives.

The recommended method to study for this exam isn’t any different than any other certification exam. You’ll still want to study any available resources, as well as actually go build solutions and get familiar with the technologies. Since there aren’t any specific training guides for this exam, you’ll want to take each individual exam objective listed and lookup all the Azure documentation pertaining to that expertise area. Then study the documentation, as well as other related articles available within the documentation or elsewhere on the web.

One of the many useful training resources when studying for any technology certification exam is to get help from other people. Maybe they’ve already taken the exam, are studying for it, or are just familiar with some piece of technology covered on one of the exam objectives. If you don’t know anyone directly then Stack Overflow is always an excellent forum to ask questions and get answers from those who know.

 

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