Preparing for the AWS Database Specialty Certification — 7 Steps
A guide with a visual topic landscape map
When I passed the certification exam, a few community members of the LinkedIn Certification group asked me about my preparation, and pointed out the absence of courses from Safari Books Online, Packt Publishing or Udemy.
Here I detail recommended preparation steps, and share the technology topics landscape map that I created that helped me prepare for the exam.
Understand the Knowledge Areas
Understand the 5 areas of certification. This is Step 0.
- Workload Specific Database Design
- Deployment and Migration
- Management and Operation
- Monitoring and Troubleshooting (including Performance)
- Database Security
Pay less attention to the weightage initially, and treat all as equally important.
RDS and Aurora are always the most frequent topics, but that is simply due to the large set of flavors and versions of those.
Databases on AWS is a very vast topic, and involves intersection of AWS Architecture knowledge with Database knowledge. While Solution Architecture Associate or Solution Architect Pro certifications are not mandatory, it is important to have an understanding of the topics.
Take the Exam Readiness Training — First Pass
The Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Database — Specialty training at the AWS Training and Certification site should be your 1st step. However, I would recommend you do this training in a fast-paced mode, and skim over the topics, during this first pass.
The idea is to map your own experience to the requirements of the certification exam. There may be some areas you have deep knowledge that match well with exam requirements, while some areas that you may not encounter daily in your work, that require some attention.
Read the Well Architected White Papers
This is step 2 of the preparation, and understanding the importance of the database aspects as part of the overall AWS Architecture.
The database sections are the most important.
The AWS Database Specialty Topic Landscape
Once you have done these steps, move to step 3. Focus on the Topic Landscape map I created. Use this to evolve your own coverage and preparation map.
I re-created my study map here with the fantastic drawing tool — draw.io.
Here is how you read it and use it: For each of the inner circle items, pick an item from the outer circle, and read or think about it. Either through practical experience or knowledge used from videos and best practice documents, understand the combination (inner circle + outer circle), how to best use it, how it affects your architecture/design, and how to best deal with it.
Here is the range and depth expected (based on my experience):
- A basic knowledge of Neptune, QLDB, DocumentDB, CloudFormation and ElastiCache (memcached) is expected.
- Intermediate level of knowledge is expected about RedShift, ElastiCache (Redis), Networking, Security, Costs and Lambda
- Detailed level of knowledge about Dynamo, RDS (all flavors), Aurora (MySQL and PostgreSQL), Migration and HA.
Read the Best Practices section in AWS Documentation
This is step 4, where you navigate step by step to each product in the AWS Documentation, and look specifically at the “Best Practices” section for each.
Absorb the knowledge and reflect on the recommendations.
AWS re:Invent Videos
Step 5 of the preparation should be watching AWS re:Invent 2017 videos (DAT3xx and DAT4xx) on YouTube. All of videos of 2017 (and some of 2016) are at the right level of depth to help with the preparation.
Some of the newer ones from re:Invent 2018/2019 help with new features.
Some links are given
AWS re:Invent 2017: NEW LAUNCH! Amazon Neptune Overview and Customer Use Cases (DAT319)
AWS re:Invent 2017: NEW LAUNCH! Deep dive on Amazon Neptune (DAT318)
AWS re:invent 2017: A Practitioner’s Guide on Migrating to, and Running on Amazon Au (DAT315)
AWS re:invent 2017: Best Practices for Migrating from Oracle and SQL Server to Amazo (DAT309)
AWS re:invent 2017: Best Practices for Running PostgreSQL on AWS (DAT314)
AWS re:invent 2017: Deep Dive on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) (DAT302)
AWS re:invent 2017: Deep Dive on the Amazon Aurora MySQL-compatible Edition (DAT301)
AWS re:invent 2017: Deep Dive on the Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-compatible Edition (DAT402)
AWS re:invent 2017: ElastiCache Deep Dive: Best Practices and Usage Patterns (DAT305)
AWS re:invent 2017: Migrating Databases and Data Warehouses to the Cloud: Getting St (DAT317)
AWS re:invent 2017: Migrating Your SQL Server Databases to Amazon RDS (DAT312)
AWS re:invent 2017: Running Oracle Databases on Amazon RDS (DAT313)
AWS re:invent 2017: ~REPEAT~ Which Database to Use When? (DAT310-R)
AWS re:invent 2017: ~REPEAT~ Advanced Design Patterns for Amazon DynamoDB (DAT403-R)
Take the Exam Readiness Training — Second Pass
I recommend taking the Exam Readiness Training again, second time, now with added focus.
Also, this is the time to go through all the links listed during the training.
Take the Practice Exam
At this point, you should be ready for the certification exam.
Taking the practice exam may help, if only to assess difficulty levels, and a last minute check to make sure that you have decent coverage of the topics.
Don’t pay attention to the marks because the practice exam is only 20 questions, and the weightage and coverage calculations cannot match the real exam.
Conclusion
This guide to preparing for the AWS Database Specialty Certification exam, and the visual topic landscape map should be useful to Database Practitioners and Data Architects.
