DM205 How to Successfully Take

DM205 How to Successfully Take & Pass Your Sybase ASE

Certification Exam

Sam LakkundiSenior Staff EducatorSybase [email protected]

What we will cover

Unit 1: Introduction to the exams

Unit 2: ASE-12Associate: What do I study ?

Unit 3: ASE- 12 Professional: What do I study?

Unit 4: Sample questions

Unit 5: About the questions

Class Abstract - Target Audience

•This session is a short discussion on the ASE exams.

• Content is from the 1 day session: ‘Preparing to take the ASE Associate Exams.’

•The student should have at least 3 months of experience with database administration with ASE for the associate exam and 6 months administration and tuning experience for the professional exam.

•Techniques and suggestions for studying for the exam will be covered.

•This session as well as our one day class will NOT reveal any actual questions that the student will encounter on the exam. However, the types of questions will be covered.

Unit #1: Introduction to the exams

2 Basic ASE Certifications CSP-ASE

Sybase Certified AssociateSybase Certified Professional


CSP Associate 12.0Completion of one multiple choice exam.

Exam contains sixty multiple choice questions.

Sample practice can be downloaded or exam full practice purchased

This exam covers both fundamental ASE system and database administration questions.


CSP Professional ASE 12.0•Pre-requisite: CSP Associate ASE 12.0, or CSP Professional ASE 11.5. (There is no powering up exam for ASE 12.0).

•Completion of one multiple choice exam. This exam contains sixty multiple choice questions.

•Sample practice can be downloaded or exam full practice purchased

•This exam covers primarily performance and tuning questions for ASE, with a few questions on advanced administration.


Where do I take the exams?

Call 1-800-8-SYBASE choose Education menu

or

At any Prometric (800-407-3926) testing center or visit www.2test.com


When do I know if I passed?Immediately. After taking the test, your score is immediately printed out and sent to Sybase.

CSP Associate ASE 12.0 75 %

CSP Professional ASE 12.0 75 %


What if I fail?The student is allowed to fail any of the two tests two times. If the student fails any of the two tests for the second time, the exam may not be taken again for the period of three months.


When do I need to be re-certified?Associate:

Every version. Just take the new Associate exam.

Professional:

Every version. If you already have a professional certification, you only need to take the professional exam. You do not have to take the associate exam again. As of version 12.0 there are no more migration exams.


What benefits do I get? Industry Recognition Use of Logo on business cards Official Certificate Differentiator for employers and promoters


What Does Sybase Certification Offer You? Increases your job advancement opportunities Provides a standard, tangible way of measuring your technical skills Provides you with a goal for self-improvement and self-development To design and implement real-world solutions, which will make you valuable to your clients and your team


How does one prepare for an exam?Customer Education: Schedules available at slc.sybase.comExperience with productsPractice Exams: Available at this conference and through eShop


Course Maps – ASE Associate We recommend courses:

Introduction to SQL

Writing Effective Stored Procedures

Fast Track to Adaptive Server Enterprise

System & Database Administration


Course Maps – ASE Professional

Performance & Tuning: Configuring ASE 12.0

Advanced Administration & Troubleshooting

Unit #2: What do I study? (Associate)

1. ASE Overview

2. ASE 12 New Features

3. Configuration & Installation

4. Resource Allocation

5. Database & Logs

6. Backup & Recovery

7. Parallel Processing

8. Cache Management

9. Security


1. ASE - Overview

• Purpose of each major system database and system table

• Locking scheme of APL and DOL tables

• ASE’s operating environment and environment variables


2. ASE 12.0 New Features

• General understanding of uses of the premium features

• General understanding of how the license manager works

• What is SySAM used for

• What are the new values for system limits that have changed


3. Configuration & Installation

• Primarily:

Know the different uses of the sp_configure command


4. Resource Allocation

• System files, raw partitions, and the dsync option

• Table partitioning

• Capacity planning; device and database management; object placement and user-defined segments

Including: How to recreate DDL from storage-related system tables

• Alter table subcommands

• Last chance and freespace thresholds


5. Database & Logs

• Know how to plan the size and manage transaction logs

• Understand how to perform logical database rebuilds


6. Backup & Recovery

• Database and transaction log dumps

• How are they processed and what functionality supported

• Dumps and loads for standby access

• Enable up to the minute recovery

• Production database backups, protecting the master database, mirroring

• Truncating the log, disaster recovery


7. Parallel Processing

• Enabling parallel processing

• Partitioning tables:

• Criteria for partitioning

• Steps involved

• Partition skew and how to rebalance a table

• Keeping partition statistics up-to-date


8. Cache Management

• Understand, at a high level, how ASE manages memory:

• data cache(s) and procedure cache sizing

• when data pages are written to disk


9. Security

• ASE’s password security features

• Managing passwords

• Know how to grant and revoke privileges in a granular fashion

• Understand the use of system roles, user-defined roles and their precedence, difference and precedence between groups and user-defined roles

• Understand the use of proxy authorization


What NOT to study:

• Anything not covered in the previous slides

• Generally, no nitpicky details including system numbers and the exact order of arguments to a system procedure

• Except, as indicated earlier, the new system limits

• No need to memorize exactly each system procedure. You should recognize the right one among the answers mostly from regular usage

•No answers refer to commands that do not exist

Unit #3: What do I study? (Professional)

1. Performance and Tuning (General)

• Tuning for a large number of user connections

• Functional limits in ASE

• General benchmarking principles

• Tuning ASE’s relinquishing cpu to O/S

• Understand use of all monitoring and configuration system procedures


2. Data Structures, OLTP & DSS Tuning

• Units of ASE device storage; APL and DOL page formats

• Understand all of the output of sp_help, and how to tune relevant parts

• Defragmentation techniques pros and cons, including reorg

• Criteria used in capacity planning

• Preventing hotspots, reducing page splits and fragmentation


2. Data Structures, OLTP & DSS Tuning (Cont’d)

• Tuning for OLTP, DSS and mixed workload

• Understand cluster ratios in DOL tables

• When to reconfigure a table to another locking scheme


3. Parallel Performance Optimization

• Which type of parallel access plans possible when

• Enabling and tuning for parallelism for different types of selects, sorts and index creation

• Including: how to optimizer chooses degree, and how to speed up index creation

• Causes of run-time adjustments, and how to specify action

• How are joins processed serially and in parallel


4. Locking and Concurrency

• Understand how inserts, updates and deletes are processed in APL and DOL tables, including locks involved

• When and how to use wait, table and readpast locks

• How to tune with the lock promotion parameters

• When to use datapages and datarows locking

• Understand cursor locking and concurrency issues

• Locking issues in tempdb; sizing and caching tempdb


4. Locking and Concurrency (Cont’d)

• How ASE manages locks with worker process families

• Understand the various ways to reduce logical lock contention

• Understand how to optimize concurrency on a given table


5. Advanced T-SQL

• The questions from this section of the exam are already covered by the topics listed under the other sections


6. Performance Assessment

• Understand how to interpret at least the most common counters in sp_sysmon

•Understand how to tune the server based on context switching measurements

• Understand how to find out which tables and stored procedures are most heavily used (hint: not in sp_sysmon)


7. Cache Management and I/O Tuning

• When to increase or decrease procedure cache percentage

• Various reasons to use named caches

• When partitioning a cache may be useful, and how far partitioning can be taken

• Various ways to reduce spinlock contention

• Factors used by optimizer to choose I/O size; Tuning large I/O buffer pools

• Raw partitions vs. system files and the dsync option


8. ASE 12.0 New Performance and Tuning and advanced System Administration Features

• Understand the use of the quiesce database command

• Understand the purpose of abstract query plans

• Using the execute immediate capability


9. Query Optimization

• Criteria used by the optimizer in costing access plans

• ASE’s min and max optimization

• When will the optimizer used various covered access plans

• Column statistics: how kept and viewed, when updated

• When, how and why to override the optimizer’s decisions

• When does the optimizer use various merge joins


10. Logical Process Manager

• Understand task engine affinity

• When and how to use:

• execution classes

• priority queues

• engine affinity

• precedence and scope

• on-the-fly adjustments


11. Other Performance and Tuning Topics

• How to speed up bcp in

• Network tuning for DSS, OLTP and mixed workload

• How to configure for additional network memory

• Network engine afficinity

•When to use cursors

• When and how to make use of denormalization techniques

• Where are the various types of statistics stored


What NOT to study:

• Anything not covered in the previous slides

• Generally, no nitpicky details including system numbers and the exact order of arguments to a system procedure\

•No answers refer to commands or features that do not exist

Unit #4 Sample questions:

•The questions on all associate exams are intuitive.

•Either you know the answer or or don’t.

•It draws out the applied ‘real life’ knowledge of the candidate.

•Memorization helps, but will not alone guarantee a passing grade.

•There are very few ‘gimmes’ on this exam, so if a question seems too easy, don’t try to look too deep: you know the answer.


Type of question NOT found on the exam:

Question:

The reasons to separate the log include:

A - Up-to-the minute recovery

B - Monitoring how full the log is

C - Mirroring the log without having to mirror the data

D - All of the above


Type of question found on the exam (Associate):

Question:

Why would you place the transaction log on a separate device?

A - allows you to use dump transaction

B - allows for minimally logged operations

C - improves performance

D - helps ensure full recovery in the event of disk failure

E - helps ensure full recovery in the event of a server crash



Question:

Select all the set command that can be used in tuning:

A - set tablecount

B - set optimized

C - set showplan

D - set statistics io

E - set recursive



Question:

Indexes are used strictly for performance.

A, True

B. False


Type of question found on the exam (Professional):

Question:

Cache spinlock contention may occur when:

A. there is a single engine

B. there is a single process running on the server

C. only selects are performed, and no modifications

D. only data pages are accessed

E. the cache involved has been partitioned

Stage 1: CSP advisory board

Unit #5 How The Question Are Chosen

Stage 1: CSP advisory boardStage 2: New ASE version



Stage 2: New ASE version

Stage 3: Testing objectives determined





Stage 4: Item pool created






Stage 5: Beta test period







Stage 6: Cut score determined







Stage 6: Cut score determined

Stage 7: Beta is split


Visit the Sybase website for more infohttp://slc.sybase.com/plan/cintro.html

Next Steps

Closing Thought:

The CSP test is one of the better certifications to obtain for a programmer. It is the responsibility and the duty for all who take it to keep the exact questions confidential. The CSP certification should be EARNED by all. Never reveal the contents to anyone. Should the questions leak out, and inexperienced programmers start obtaining this certification, it diminishes the value of the certification for all who have obtained it legitimately, through hard work and studying.

Keep the faith and good luck!!!

Contact Information

On the Partner.Nethttp://arachne:8887/Partner.net2/education/instructor/On the Internet (External) http://slc.sybase.com/certification/index.htmlOn the Intranet (External)http://www-sybaseu.sybase.com/su_programs/certification/index.htm

Brant Stevens (Certification Program Manager)email: [email protected] (509-328-2571)Sam Lakkundi (For All Technical Related Questions)email: [email protected] (781-564-6270)Maryelizabeth Camilli – North America Education Partner Contactemail: [email protected] (978-287-1558)

DM205 How to Successfully Take

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