Earning the MCTS SQL Server 2008

Earning the MCTS SQL Server 2008

I said on March 8 that I would be posting on, among other things, my recap of studying for and taking the SQL Server 2008 Implementation and Maintenance MCTS Training, and also my recap of SQL Saturday #33 in Charlotte, NC. Then life took over, things got busy, etc. I won’t sit here and type up excuses or anything, I’ll just forge ahead with my original plan regardless of how late I am with it. We’ll cover the MCTS Certification in this post, and I already have the #sqlsat33 post half written, I will schedule that for tomorrow.

First, I had planned back in September of 2009 to attain my Microsoft certification in SQL Server 2005, so I requested that my company purchased the Self-Paced Training Kit for me to study from, which they did. Subsequently, in October, we upgraded to SQL Server 2008. I decided that because I had been studying for weeks that I would still go for the 2005 MCTS, so I kept working on that. It wasn’t until January that I was convinced, mostly because of working with 2008 for months, that I should try for the 2008 MCTS.

This created a bit of a quandary, first because I had studied 2005 for six months, and second, I didn’t have the Self Paced Training Kit for the 2008 MCTS. I actually acquired a non-Microsoft Press product, more of a video training disk with practice test software, which was OK, but pointed out the next hurdle – the 2008 practice tests covered almost exclusively the new features of 2008, which of course included nothing that I had been studying for months! Throughout January I learned quite a bit about the new features, studied BOL and took practice test after practice. It wasn’t actually until the week before the actual test that I started getting passing grades on these practice tests! Now I was getting nervous.

I probably shouldn’t have gotten nervous. I signed an NDA when I took the test so I can’t reveal what was on it, but I can tell you that what’s on the actual test has very little to do with what is in the study guides I used! From the first question, I was asked about things unfamiliar, and in some cases, the only way I got the answer was because I remembered it being asked about as a #sqlhelp question on Twitter! (shows once again that #sqlhelp works!) In the end, I passed, and I am now a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist in SQL Server 2008 Implementation and Maintenance, w00t!

Next up, MCITP! Going to go for that in the next month or so.