Introduction
The purpose of the Denodo Platform 8.0 Certified Architect Professional (DEN80EDUCAP) exam is to provide organizations that use Denodo Platform 8.0 with a means of identifying suitably qualified data architects who have demonstrated real expertise in data virtualization deployments and are ready to successfully accomplish new projects.
Denodo recognizes that not all the people interested in Denodo Certification have the same experience.
Contents of the exam
Candidates for this certification must have participated in a data virtualization project with a data architect role and will need to submit detailed technical information about a deployment including the following topics and subject areas:
- Use Cases
- Business goals and objectives
- Architecture
- Project details
Preparing for the Certification Exam
Based on your previous experience with the Denodo Platform, use this guide to help plan and prepare for the Denodo Architect Professional Certification exam.
If you need it, there are some examples of questions that can be found in the Exam Guide.
Keep in mind that one of the questions is a document that must be attached to the exam. Please, check the “File Upload” section of this document to get more details about this.
You don’t have any experience with the Denodo Platform
In the Education area of the Denodo website, the candidate can find plenty of information about how to get started with Data Virtualization. Before taking the exam, we also recommend you:
- Visit the Denodo Community and read the Denodo Platform documentation.
- Download and practice with the Denodo Express, if you don’t have access to a Denodo Platform with a full license.
- Complete the Denodo Platform tutorials:
- Practice getting some hands-on experience and participating in real projects with Denodo Platform 8.0.
For achieving the Denodo Architect Professional certification we recommend:
- Attend our architect training course for the Denodo Platform 8.0:
- Achieve the Architect Associate Certification first, as it is a pre-requisite for applying to this more advanced level.
You have taken the recommended Denodo Training courses for the Denodo Platform 8.0 Certified Architect Professional exam and have achieved the Associate Certification
The candidate is ready now to participate as a data architect in his/her first data virtualization deployment. After this first data virtualization deployment experience, the candidate is qualified to apply for the Architect Professional Certification.
You earned a previous version of the Denodo Platform Architect Professional certification
If you want to renew your certification for a new major release of the Denodo Platform and have participated in a data virtualization project deployment with the new major release, you are ready to apply for renewing the Architect Professional certification for the new release. During the exam, in the description of your project, try to emphasize the usage of the new features found in the new major release.
Please check Denodo Certification FAQ for additional information in this instance.
Exam Topics
In this section, you can find the details of the technical topics and subject areas covered by the exam.
Use Cases
In this section, the candidate should demonstrate that they understand the project in which they are working, and the main use cases implemented during this project.
We recommend focusing on the use cases that provide the highest business impact. Use case descriptions should be more specific but always with a business focus, as an example:
- Unified view of risk exposure for compliance applications
- Single View of customer information for a customer service desktop application
- Semantic Layer for the Data Lake
- Abstraction layer to migrate an EDW to the Cloud
- etc.
For each use case, it can be useful to provide some technical information such as the relevant data sources for each of them or the data publishing method selected.
How to prepare
As a reference, for a description of the most common data virtualization use cases and patterns, the student can attend the Data Virtualization Architect course (DEN80EDU07A). In addition to it, the Solutions area of the Denodo website contains useful content about this topic (https://www.denodo.com/en/solutions/overview).
Business goals and objectives
In this section, the examinee should demonstrate their knowledge of the main business goals of the project in which they are working, and it will mainly depend on the specific business domain and requirements.
How to prepare
For guidance about how to define business goals and objectives the student can visit some real customer cases available at the following link at the Denodo website: https://www.denodo.com/en/customers
Architecture
In this section, the candidate should demonstrate that they understand the architecture graphic attached to the exam. Please, see the section “File Upload” for more information.
How to prepare
The student can see as a reference some data virtualization architecture samples in the materials of the Denodo Data Virtualization Architect course (DEN80EDU07A).
Project Details
In this section, the candidate should demonstrate that they understand the different roles and responsibilities of the persons participating during the project implementation. Also, the candidate has to provide details of her/his specific participation in the project.
How to prepare
The student can find information about the different roles in a typical data virtualization deployment in the Denodo Expert Trial “Denodo Development Lifecycle” (https://community.denodo.com/expert-trails) and in the “Denodo Project Management” course (DEN80EDU19DS).
Also, the student can visit some videos describing real customer deployments that are available on the Denodo website (https://www.denodo.com/en/resources, search for webinars) where in some cases the customer highlights the main challenges during the deployment.
For samples of other projects, the student can visit the customer cases available on the Denodo website (https://www.denodo.com/en/customers).
The student can visit some videos describing real customer deployments that are available on the Denodo website (https://www.denodo.com/en/resources, search for webinars) where in many cases the customer highlights the experience and lessons learned during the project.
Answering the different question types
There are different types of questions: “Recording” for an audio/video description, “File upload” for the architecture graphic and for questions that have to be answered in writing. We include here a screenshot for every question type as an example:
Recording
The user has to click on “Skip and Start Video Recording” to initiate the recording that will last 3 minutes maximum. Once completed the user has to click on “Stop Recording”, the recording will be saved and the system will go to the next question.
File Upload
The user has to upload a file to describe the experience as a data architect in a data virtualization project. You can find the template here. It you cannot use this template, you can attach a document that includes the answer to the following questions:
- Project Description
- Customer Industry
- Project title (if any)
- Description of the project including main use cases implemented
- Architecture graphic. It should include at a minimum:
- Key data sources integrated in the project
- Main consumer applications
- Interaction with other tools/applications (e.g. data governance, data quality, etc.)
- Security details (e.g. integration with identity providers, key vaults, policy servers, etc.)
- Details of the deployment (whether it is on-premises or in the cloud, hybrid, multi-cloud, etc.)
- There is no need to include in the architecture the different environments (development / pre-production / production), for the sake of making the graphic easier to understand the production environment suffices.
- Project Technical Details
- Information about data modeling best practices in your project: implementation of a canonical model, usage of interface views, model import from data modeling tools, etc.
- Indicate whether any custom extensions were used in your project: custom functions, store procedures, policy handlers, custom wrappers, tag-based policies
- Describe the performance configuration in your project: data movement targets, possible integration with a MPP engine, configuration of summaries, etc.
- Describe the caching configuration and policies used in your project.
- Provide a brief analysis of the workload expected in your project and information about the sizing of your solution: type of queries, volumetric information (e.g. #concurrent queries, etc.), possible usage of Resource Manager, sizing details.
- Describe briefly the security architecture in your project: security protocols configured, integration with Identity Providers, configuration of SSO, etc.
- Describe the publishing options deployed: JDBC, OData, REST, GeoJSON, GraphQL, etc.
- Describe the Data Catalog configuration and possible integration with Data Governance tools (if any).
- Provide information about the Integration with Version Control Systems and metadata migration policies between environments.
Once the candidate has completed all the questions she/he has to click on the “Finish Test” button and the test will be finished.
Conclusions
In this “How-To” document, we have reviewed the contents of the Denodo Platform 8.0 Certified Architect Professional exam and included some guidance about how to answer the questions of the exam as well as how to prepare for them. The candidate can find additional information about the exam in the Denodo Platform 8.0 Certified Architect Professional Exam Guide.