BI Certifications - CBIP Material for the exam

Finally I got some time to write something more about CBIP certification.

First off all, don’t think this certification is the ticket for your next job. It’s just a motivation to let you learn more and improve your skills. Naturally that if you improve your skills, you have more conditions and recognition to get your BI job, but don’t think a certification by itself do it for you.  Relating to this certification, it's a way to TDWI makes money like all other certifications that exists around the world. But at least in this case, it seems more credible and more recognized than for example Microsoft certifications. Why? Just because there are a lot of “brain dumps” spread in the internet with exactly some questions of the real Microsoft exams. TDWI do a very good job on this field… although having a big number of question not aligned with the certification subject (like for example in ETL module) they are good and unique! The TDWI staff in Germany is also amazing and very kindly with you! See my experience there in 2009!

Now let’s go to the main reason to write this post! I’ve promised to the dozens of people that contacted me (almost since the post I wrote about CBIP experience in 2009) for help them on getting material guidance. For that reason here am I with the promised post! (Sorry for the late reply).

To make these exams, you should have minimal real-world, or at least huge academic experience, on the exam specialty that you’re thinking to get. If you have this pre-requisite then I think you should consider the suggestions I’m writing below.

Suggestion 01 - Examinations Guide

You MUST buy and read the CBIP Examinations Guide. This guide contains detailed exam outlines, reference reading lists, sample exam questions, and answer explanations for each exam included in the CBIP program. Testing software and practice timed exams are included with the guide. Taking the sample exams will identify areas where additional study and/or work experience may be necessary prior to testing. If you don’t have this examinations guide you will probably feel lost during the exam… And don’t forget that you don’t have too much time to think! The testing software is for sure crucial!

Suggestion 02 - Mandatory Books

You MUST buy and read the “Performance Dashboard” and “Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App” books! Why? The first, in addition to being a very interesting book, was written by the TDWI director at that time: Wayne Eckerson! And the second is a book that resumes the concept of BI in a simple and objective way. These two books are an investment that you should have! (And buy it… do not try to find illegal copies of this book on the internet… because doing so, you’ll not encourage authors to write more amazing contents like these ones). I should add that on these books, you will find several answers to some exam questions.

Now let’s go to remaining materials that although not mandatory, should be read at least some of the topics where exist some doubts. You probably don’t have time to read more books, but I also suggest several others in a previous post. Try also to get some information in the internet about the following topics: Dimensional Modeling (Techniques like Slowly Changing Dimension, Junk Dimension, Mini-Dimension, Outrigger, Role-Play Dimension… Fact table types: Transactional, Cumulative Snapshot, Periodic Snapshot, Factless and Factless Coverage), Data Warehousing architectures (Bus model, Hub and Spoke, Federated and Independent Data Marts), OLAP Architectures (MOLAP, ROLAP, HOLAP), Data Warehousing Methodologies (Both Kimball and Larissa Moss methodologies), Data Mining and make some research on terms like BPM, CRM, OLAP, ETL, BAM…
I hope this post helps you!
Regards,
Pedro

BI Graduation – Best student award!

One more season, one more success!

This success is merit of the 24 talent student’s with willingness to learn and share their knowledge with everyone. Last week, was held the awards ceremony where congratulations were made to all students for their efforts over the last year especially to Carlos José Monteiro who got the best result. The ceremony was then followed by a final convivial dinner offer by the University.

The 3rd edition took off at the same day with 25 students enrolled, which is proof that this graduation is on the right path and is becoming increasingly a national BI reference on this field. This success is far beyond the interest of students who have gone there, but also due to the magnificent organization exists in this University primarily to Filomena Lopes. For my part, I thank the confidence placed on me and it is with great pride that I accepted the invitation to re-join the team of the 3rd edition

This success has allowed dreaming up with new projects that would make this graduation getting more visibility at national and international levels... One of the main projects for this purpose, is underway and I hope it becomes reality with the students support.

Special thanks to the post-graduation partners, which allowed some approximation between “real” and academic world through several seminars and mentoring the students in their final projects

BI MVP - My time has come!

My time has come!
Today I received the email from Microsoft with MVP award!
This award it’s the recognition of all my effort, passion and dedication to this amazing world of Business Intelligence. I know that I have lot a work to do and even more responsibility to follow Microsoft and community expectations.

Now, I cannot forget to thank all the persons that once again, helped me to achieve this award. I want to thank primarily to my princess Joana that is always by my side and to my family. Some special thanks to all direct and indirect support:

- To the all visitors of this blog (sorry for the late answers!)
- To the pos-graduation students on BI from Universidade Portucalense (Porto)
- To the master graduation students on BI from ISCTE (Lisboa)
- To Dra. Filomena Lopes for all the trust placed on me during last year
- To Dr. Orlando Belo for all support in my dissertation in the last years
- To Dra. Maria José Trigueiros for all the magic words (I'm wait a quickly recover!)
- To all those persons that believed in me, even more than myself!

Despite the award, I guarantee that I'll keep the same personality and I’ll remain my independence and always be watching to what all BI vendors and BI consultants are doing. I’m with Microsoft because I’ll believe in their strategy and If you want to join me in this adventure, I think you’ll not be disappointed. Unlike many other BI vendors, Microsoft remains near the community and always present. In my case, I want to thank to João Bilhim that is an amazing person that always encouraged me, to be inside this amazing world of Business Intelligence. Microsoft has few years in the BI market and for that reason is not yet the number one, but the first position is too close. If you want to join this adventure don’t lose the event with Donald Farmer next 16 April here in Portugal (just send me an email)

Regards,

Pedro

BI Recognition - Sharepoint MVP award

Dear friends,
Today I’ll dedicate this post to a friend that recently achieved a MVP Sharepoint Award. MVP is an award that Microsoft gives to all those special persons that help people that are constantly helping people on specific subjects. Maybe someday it’ll be my turn… but for now, I just want to congratulate André for his accomplishment. I deal very well with the success of all my friends, mainly those like André and Jorge Paulino, that are always sharing knowledge with communities. I truly believe that Portuguese guys have a lot of knowledge to share with the world, despite most portuguese people think the opposite (portuguese people in most cases think that what is being done in Portugal is always bad… but persons like me, André Lage (MVP), Jorge Paulino (MVP) and several hundreds of portuguese people are fighting against them)

Andre has a similar life history to mine… he took his IT degree on “Universidade Portucalense” some years ago (like me) and moved away from his city (from Oporto to Lisbon like me) looking for better challenges.

Andre in the first person after receiving this award:
“
First: Recognition
Second: never give up.
Third: To assist, in every sense of the word
Four: do not make the title as a goal, but a mission
Fifth: As Microsoft says "Your Potential. Our Passion"
“
Andre has 30 years old, born in Porto (Portugal) and took his Information Management degree on “Universidade Portucalense” between 1999 and 2004. He’s a System Architect, Technical Leader and Consultant on SharePoint Corporate Portals in Sybase, SBS Portugal, with international focus. Andre has an extensive curriculum where his major steps are the support to several Sharepoint communities, the Codeplex Community contributions, speaker on Sharepoint 2010 webcasts and the contribution to BI Resort community and this MVP award. Check is blog here.

I hope to refer several other friends in future posts!

Regards, Pedro.

BI Certifications - CBIP/TDWI Certifications done!

I started writing this post on the return trip to Portugal. It was a very enriching and experience trip, which I reached one more objective I had in mind for more than two years. I passed the four exams and got the specialization in Business Analytics and Data Management provided by The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI - www.TDWI.org)

To whom I dedicate this achievement...I'd like to dedicate the achievement of this goal, besides of course my family and girlfriend who accompanied me on this trip to Germany, two very special persons. Firstly, to Mrs. Maria José Trigueiros for all messages and follow that gave me along the master. Secondly, to my master adviser Mr. Orlando Belo, who accompanied me on a daily basis during the dissertation. These two persons, directly and indirectly supported me in the last two years, and for sure without them, it would be difficult to maintain my motivation and strength to deepen my knowledge in this amazing world of Business Intelligence.

The exams…Relating to the exams, what I felt was that in fact, the level of difficulty is high and mainly because there is less than a minute to answer to each question. There are 110 questions to be answered in 90 minutes ... Each question has 4 possible answers, where two of them are usually very similar and can be confusing ... When the "mother" language is not English, is even more complicated because some questions and their answers are long.

Fortunately, I was lucky to begin with the apparently the less complicated exam to make, and it allowed me to understand the time management that should be looked at, in order to do other exams. To get an idea, in the first exam when I had only 5 minutes to finish, I had 20 questions to answer... it was an authentic stress and the last question was answered over the last second ... There's no time to think and go back to review the answers ... that is, or you known the answer and quickly respond to a question, or it will be better to go ahead to next question!

It is difficult to describe the best way to prepare for the exams ... Normally the scope of a normal exam it’s a well-defined scope and the issues are related to the context and usually reading a book or two is enough. But in CBIP/TDWI exams it is quite different... you need to have a real-world experience and read several (many) books. But for the preparation and bibliography to make the CBIP exams, I’ll prepare/describe in a future post.

I made and passed in four exams: Information Systems (core), Data Warehouse (core), Business Analytics and Data Management that turns me a specialized professional in Business Analytics and Data Management. The more complicated exam was the Information Systems which is too much technical and detailed.

TDWI Germany Centre...It all started at 8:00 in the morning of last Friday (06-Nov-2009)... in the TDWI Germany centre, located about 30 km’s from Cologne (Germany) where I was accommodated with my girlfriend Joana. The facilities of the centre are very good and the staff really fantastic, especially Simmone and Mr. Guenter Fuhrmeister, CEO of SIGS DATACOM (TDWI Partner) ... They both received me very well and they greatly reduced my stress caused by so many tests on the same day. In addition to all the sympathy and coffees, snacks, drinks, and others... they offered me an amazing book that I will start reading during this week, wrote by Frank Buytendijk. (Click on the book image to preview the book)



The Cologne city...Cologne (German: Köln) is Germany's fourth-largest city after Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, and is the largest city both in the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than 10 million habitants. It is one of the oldest cities in Germany, having been founded by the Romans in the year 30 BC.
Cologne lies on the Rhine. The city's world famous Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom) is the seat of the Roman Catholic Archbishopric of Cologne. The University of Cologne (Universität zu Köln) is one of Europe's oldest universities and internationally renowned for its economics department.

(reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne)

The party...At the end it was the party where my princess Joana was waiting for me at the in Cologne... we started enjoy this fabulous city with some of the advices given by Simone. We were focused mainly in the shopping area and near the Rhine river. It is a beautiful city with an intense movement of people not only in the shopping area, but also in the restaurants and bars area. We attend, almost every day, to a Cuban bar where we drank exotic drinks as capiroska, mojito and others!


My sensation is that I’ll return to Germany to take the other CBIP specializations very soon... I hope this post was helpful to you.

Regards,

Pedro

BI Certification - CBIP Exams

Dear friends,
Passed almost a month after the last time I wrote here ... In fact last month has been very hard… and the next also promised with several projects in mind. And one of these projects that I've been thinking for more than 2 years… is the world Business Intelligence certification (CBIP) provided by TDWI.

The TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute™) was founded in 1995 and provides education, training, certification, news, and research for executives and information technology (IT) professionals worldwide.

Next 6 November 2009, I’ll be in Germany to take the CBIP exams for at least one of the 5 key specialities.

– Leadership & Management
– Business Analytics
– Data Analysis & Design
– Data Integration
– Administration & Technology

I’ll try 3 specialities exams, plus 2 other exams that are required and common to all specialities:

Information Systems
Data Warehousing

I have a lot of subjects to write… I’ll promise (once again) that I’ll be more often writing here…
Regards,
Pedro

BI Certifications - Microsoft Certification Discounts

It’s show time!!!… Now is a great time to take Microsoft certification programs. Microsoft announces that will be offering until the final of this year a discount up to 25%, in their exams. There are two certification Microsoft paths in Business Intelligence area, the MCTS (Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist) and MCITP (Microsoft Certified IT Professional) that are under discount… don’t hesitate… schedule right now the exam through this link
I’ll do the SQL 2008 exams in the first week of November 2009… join me!

Certification on SQL 2005 version

Exam 70-445 (MCTS BI)

Exam 70-445 + Exam 70-446 (MCITP BI)

Certification on SQL 2008 version

Exam 70-448 (MCTS BI)

Exam 70-448 + Exam 70-452 (MCITP BI)

Regards,

Pedro

BI Education - ExpertExchange Guru Certification

Experts Exchange has about 90.000 members around the world, and is currently the best place to share knowledge with the comunity.

In the overall I’m in 1908 position…

Yesterday, it was another important day in my career, I finally achieve the Guru certification on SQL Server 2005 zone. It was six months since my first certification answering questions regarding Business Intelligence issues with Microsoft Tools. (SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, MDX…)

As I told you before, there are 9 different ranks that you could achieve, I’m now in the 7º rank, but I will try to achieve the higher… maybe I will wait some years but I will try!

I knew some fantastic people in Experts Exchange (EE) website, and I found some weeks ago, two Portuguese guys that are also answering questions but in .Net development zones. For each certification, EE will send you a t-shirt as a gift…

Join us in this world!

BI Education - ExpertExchange Master Certification

Dear Friends,

After 2 months answering questions in www.experts-exchange.com I finally obtained the master certification in SQL Server 2005. This is one of the reasons that I didn’t update the blog so frequently! This is the certification that I won today:

There are 9 different ranks that you could achieve, I’m only in the first rank, but I will try to achieve the higher. Why you don’t join the game? It’s cool, you feel that understand something for some subject and you can help other people. lolol

The ranks http://www.experts-exchange.com/ranksDefined.jsp

It’s fantastic receive feedback from the asker as you can see for the image below

I will be waiting for you on ExpertsExchange!

Cheers!