(So, unfortunate thatthere are no emoticons in blogger
). I finally("finally", because Ihave been planning to take this for a long time now) cleared my
Datastage Certification. There are a few things which give you the joy
comparable to getting your certification. I want to thank my friends
Ajay Prakash and SubhaKarthik for giving me the moral support for this
certification.
I had blogged (Road to Datastage Certification) about how all this certification stuff started. I had planned to take the certification on 26th
of this month. I applied for a leave on this day, to buy myself time to
read the documentation for my certification. Booked the test at 5:30 PM
in the evening by taking a cue from Vincent's
experience with the exam. I started the day well by getting up at 6:30
AM and jogging for some distance. I was preparing happily when this guy
from the prometric center calls me up at around 2:00 PM and says that I
won't be able to take my certification because of some problem with
their server (From when did Prometric centers start having servers of
their own :?, I thought it might have been a problem with their
internet connection). He asked me to call him up before I started to
the exam center, in case the server issue gets fixed. I was very
disappointed on hearing this, as I was highly pumped up to take the
exam. Anyway, I kept reading the documentation, and trying out things
on my VM. At around 5:10 PM I called up that guy, and got a happy reply
from him saying that the server was up. I quickly went through the
important notes I had jotted down during preparation (No matter how
much preparation you do, you will never be "satisfied" with your
preparation ). I got on my bicycle in my tracks and a T-shirt and
got off to the certification center. I reached the center by 5:25 PM
(It's about 250 yards from my home) and, by the time I got in front of
the computer to take the test, it was 5:38 PM. I finished the exam in
about an hour and reviewed all the answers in the next 15
minutes(finished 30 minutes before the end time). I clicked on the End
button with my adrenaline on an all time high!! I was on Cloud number
"99" when I saw that I passed the exam with a good score. I thank God
for this, and happily come out of the exam
As for the exam, It
was a moderately tough exam, It had 79 questions most of which had
multiple answers. There were also a few questions which ask you to drag
and drop the right boxes in the options given (I was impressed ). In
all, if you prepare well and have some good experience in developing
Parallel jobs, debugging jobs and administering Datastage, the exam
shouldn't be very difficult. If you don't do all that, don't panic, go
through the documentation which comes with the Datastage client, that
should help you out with things you don't do.
This was the split up of questions in the exam:
Section/Category Number of Items
- Installation and Configuration 6 out of 79
- Metadata 4 out of 79
- Persistent storage 10 out of 79
- ParallelArchitecture 10 out of 79
- Databases 9 out of 79
- Data Transformation 11 out of 79
- Combining and Sorting Data 8 out of 79
- Automation and Production Deployment 7 out of 79
- Monitor and Troubleshoot 7 out of 79
- Job Design 7 out of 79
- Go
through the installation and configuration guide, Especially the
configuration on a Unix machine and the configuration of Enterprise
Edition on USS. There were a few questions about the Unix Kernel
settings, so don't ignore them. - Metadata would be an easy
section, Read about different types of datatypes in Datastage, ways to
import metadata. Also know about different OSH datatypes. - Persistent
Storage is a section which asks questions about Datasets and Filesets.
This should be another easy section if you have played around with
Datasets. Know how data is stored in these two files - Parallel
Architecture is a huge thing and you should read the Parallel job
developer's guide and the Parallel job Advanced developer's guide to
score in this section. There was a question about conductor nodes,
section leaders and players, which was taken straight out of the
Parallel job developer's guide. - This is one section which
consumed a lot of my time for preparation, I have just used Oracle as
the database in my Datastage jobs. But this is not enough, you are
supposed to know "everything" about Oracle, DB2 and Teradata (These
were the only databases on which I got questions). Read through the
complete documentation for these stages, and don't forget the
environment variables which effect these stages. - Data
Transformation is an easy stage if you have created even a few jobs in
Datastage Parallel edition, This should be the section with which you
are most familiar. Questions in this section can be answered with a
little preparation. - This section has a lot of questions
about the sort stage, join, merge, lookup and aggregator stages. Make
sure that you know all the environment variables which effect the
performance of these stages. Also go through the differences between
similar stages (such as the differences between Merge and Lookup). - This
is an interesting section which covers Job Sequences (which are not
documented in the Parallel Job Developer's guide!!) and stuff about the
command line interface to Datastage. Know all the things possible with
the use of "dsjob" and similar commands. - This section had a lot
of show and tell questions. It had a question which had an exhibit of a
job log and asked us to pick up the log which has the OSH code. For
this section go through all the Environment variables present in the
Reporting category and know how each variable effects the job log. - The last section (Am I happy :D) , It has questions in which you are asked to optimize the design of a job.
On
a scale of 1-10 for toughness, I would say that this test stands at 8.5
(I love fractions ). It is tough in that it tests the breadth of
your knowledge in Datastage.
I was a guy who didn't belive in
certifications, I was of the idea that no certification can measure
your actual skill on a Tool, because with enough time and with "NO"
practical experience, you can get a pretty decent score in any
certification. I guess I was wrong, These are a few benefits I didn't
know about a Certification:
- You get a LOT OF CONFIDENCE when
you are certified, it gives you a benchmark against which you can
compare yourself with the rest of the guys. - More importantly,
it fills a lot of gaps in your knowledge. I can't really list out the
technical stuff I learnt during the preparation for my certification.
This makes you a better developer however good you currently are. - It
is a humbling experience (It was for me!). You get to see the things
which you don't know, It's like a reality check which is good to have.
And it opens up possibilities for your jobs, You connect to the
inquisitive child within you during the preparation. - It gives you a very good break from the routine stuff which you do every day.
- Finally, it may get you a better job
If these things don't motivate you enough, then you got some serious problems
I
would encourage people to take certifications (doesn't matter which
certification you take). Now, I will stop my lecture about
certifications and put down a few useful resources which helped me with
my certification.
Resources I used:
- The link to the topics to be covered for the certification, This is "THE MOST IMPORTANT" document which will help you with your certification
- IBM InfoSphere DataStage Data Flow and Job Design, a BEAutiful and much needed document for Datastage, (Thanks Vincent for blogging about it)
- Vincent's entry in ITtoolbox
- Vincents entry in Squidoo for certification (a very good one)
- Ray's set of sample questions
- FAQ from DSXchange
- http://datastagejobs.blogspot.com/2007/01/datastage-certification-study-guide.html
- http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/bi/websphere/archives/the-top-7-online-datastage-tutorials-15526
- Another set of good pages: http://etl-tools.info/en/datastage/datastage_tutorial.
- Vincent's experience with the certification
Please leave comments if you find this post helpful, or if this post "helped" you in wasting time
That is all I have for now, Whew! Blogging is no easy thing!