In April this year I sat the Microsoft Exam 70-761 and after that I decided to start studying for Exam 70-762 Developing SQL Databases. The exam was 47 questions in 2 hours (plus 30 minutes reading time) and had a mixture of one answer multiple choice questions, multiple answer multiple choice questions, drop-down quest

ions to complete T-SQL queries, drag and drop questions to complete T-SQL queries where you need to get the right syntax in the right order. There were some questions that you were required to write syntax. There were a number of case studies and scenario based questions. Not your basic a,b,c,d multiple choice question.

The exam covered a wide range of skills covered in the exam objectives. Particular emphasis on columnstore indexes, Azure and on-premise performance management, monitoring and tracing. There was a number of questions on the creation and design of tables, views, triggers, functions and stored procedures.

Good knowledge was also required of:

• Indexing was important, including query tuning, index and statistic optimisation.

• In memory-optimised tables, durability settings and natively compiled stored procedures.

• Transactions, concurrency and locking behavior/isolation levels.

Overall this was a very thorough and moderately difficult exam and it took all the time required to complete.