Datasheet

Chapter 1

Microsoft Certification

There are three SQL Server related exams that participate in different certifications offered by

Microsoft. These include exams on development, administration, and data warehousing. Note that, at

the time of writing, there are only exams for SQL Server 7.0. The SQL Server 2000 exams are due to go

to Beta in January 2001. If you are interested in becoming certified visit http://www.microsoft.com/

technet/training/default.asp, where there is a wealth of information on how to study and get up to date.

Each of these exams has some relevance to the MCP, MCSD, MCDBA, and MCSE certifications.

Indeed, the development and administration exams are core to the MCDBA certification process.

This book was not purposely written to address any Microsoft exam – it is focused on trying to

successfully prepare you to develop applications using SQL Server 2000. Even so, the development

exam (70-029 for SQL Server 7 and 70-229 for SQL Server 2000) was written to try and test to see if

you are ready to do just that – and almost everything I can think of that's covered in the exam is

addressed somewhere in this book.

I am not going to tell you that if you read this book you will pass that exam. I participated in the authoring

of that exam, and I have had to take it myself – it is one seriously nasty exam. Still, the topics covered in

this book happen to speak right to the heart of the exam – if you do well going through this book, the odds

are you'll do just fine on the exam (sorry folks – this isn't exam cram so no guarantees on that!).

Summary

We've made a start and talked briefly about where the database world has been, database access, and a

few other miscellaneous items. This is really just conducting some bookkeeping and preparation to get

you ready to go.

In our next few chapters, we're going to take a deeper look into many of the basics of building and

making use of a SQL Server database. I strongly encourage you to run through the many examples in

this book. As I mentioned earlier, there are very few concepts in this book that do not have specific

examples associated with them – take advantage of that and you'll be taking full advantage of this book.