I have renewed my Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification for another year, and since this one actually required me to sit down and think rather than just click through some formalities, I thought it worth a quick note here.
The renewal is free. It is an online assessment on Microsoft Learn, not a full proctored exam. That might sound easier than the original DP-700, and in some ways it is. But the questions are updated, the skill areas evolve alongside the platform, and Microsoft has made a point of keeping the content aligned with what Fabric actually looks like today. The skills were last updated on April 20, 2026, with minor changes across most sections.
What the certification covers
The exam breaks down into three equally weighted areas, each around 30 to 35 percent of the total:
Implement and manage an analytics solution covers workspace configuration, lifecycle management with deployment pipelines and version control, security and governance at row, column, object, and folder level, and orchestration choices between Dataflows Gen2, pipelines, and notebooks.
Ingest and transform data is where most of the practical depth lives. Full and incremental load patterns, OneLake shortcuts and mirroring, PySpark, SQL, and KQL transformations, handling duplicates and late-arriving data, and streaming via Eventstreams and Spark structured streaming.
Monitor and optimize an analytics solution covers monitoring ingestion and transformation, resolving errors across pipelines, Dataflows, notebooks, Eventhouses, and Eventstreams, and performance optimization for Lakehouse tables, pipelines, data warehouses, and Spark.
Why bother renewing
Fabric moves fast. I have been working with Fabric in various capacities for a while now, and the platform I certified against originally does not look identical to what I use today. Real-Time Intelligence has matured, OneLake security has grown considerably, and the orchestration story has gotten richer. Going through the renewal assessment is a reasonable way to check whether there are gaps between what I knew and what the platform has become.
It is not a substitute for hands-on work. But it is a decent forcing function to at least read the change log and spend an hour or two with areas that have moved the most.
If you are new to IT you might not yet have become aware that the tech stack is ever changing. I’ve been around long enough to have seen my share of DOS, Windows and also SQL server editions, but what is not immediately apparent is that this forces the people in the industry to, at some point, make a choice; become a dinosaur or adapt.
If your choice is dinosaur, you will probably be fighting to keep the workloads coming as time passes by. At best it’s a bit of a gamble, to put all your eggs into one basket so to speak. Tech changes and so will demand for the one tech you have mastered to perfection. Albeit the upside of the gamble is that little to no-one knows the tech in question which means you can ask a higher price for your services.
On the other hand Carl Lewis’s accomplishments is actually a great image of how the modern IT worker has to spread the interest on more than one tech. Carl Lewis was a childhood hero of mine and among other astonishing merits he was undefeated for a period of seven years (7) in long jump (still has the world record indoor) – but many remember him for his incredible performances in 100m and 200m dash. This just helps build the image that I am trying to convey here – modern IT people will almost certainly be specialised in more that one tech – or this particular tech evolves into something new.
On September 11th in 2020 I passed the AZ-400 test to become a Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert and as this is an Expert level certification, Microsoft requires this certification to be renewed within a specified amount of time. Microsoft operates with four levels of certification.
In a month from now, at the time of writing, I would no longer be allowed to flash that I am a certified Azure DevOps Engineer, unless… unless I renew the certification. Certification renewals is something fairly new to the Microsoft certification program and I must say I welcome the opportunity given by Microsoft to update your accolades for free. Yes, for free.
90 days (and 30 days) or so in advance, Microsoft sends a notification, that your certification will expire unless you renew it. The process of renewing is really simple and it all comes down to you and how updated your skills are on the subject. One of the smart things about renewals is that Microsoft gets to test your knowledge on features and tech added to its services since you first took the test. And this could potentially be a lot of new ground to cover. Even though Microsoft aquired Github back in the summer of 2018, there has been put in a lot of work to inhale Github into the Microsoft stack – much of this work has surfaced since I took the test initially, so the renewal test has a lot more questions on Github – which makes so much sense.
The email you receive would look similar to this one, except of course time and type of certification would be different:
All you have to do is click the link, log in with your Microsoft Learn account and off you go.
It could be that the number of questions vary, but I have had a two (2) renewals lately and both consisted of about 25 questions. There have been no cases like in the real tests, hence just 25 individual questions on tech stuff related to the overall topic of the certification. Also, all of my question have been multiple choice/single answer – meaning no multiple possible answers/ranking of tasks to perform or code to complete. But I am sure they are working on getting that in there.
Once you’ve completed all questions you will be directed to either a pass or fail page (unfortunately I didn’t screen grab that when I failed the AZ-400 renewal the first time, so I am not able to display how that look). Microsoft Learn even provides you with a collection of learning materials (from Microsoft Learn) that fits your weak areas so you can concentrate on getting that up to speed- this is very helpful!
If you pass, the resulting page looks something like this
There is also an explanation on the various areas of the test and how you performed in those categories:
This one is from my DA-100 renewal which is now outdated and superseded by PL-300
Final thoughts
Having a history of every other year having to take on new certifications, even in the same tech space, I really welcome the idea of certification renewals. For instance I have SQL Server 2005, 2008 and 2016 certifications but, at least in my mind, it makes a lot more sense to be able to communicate that I am certified in SQL Server and the certification is up to date, for instance with the Azure SQL Server Administrator certification – no editions attached – it’s just active or not. This goes for any technology/role that manages to stick around and evolve.
Best of luck to all you out there who are either renewing or taking on new exams.
This summer my family and I spent almost three weeks driving to Germany and into Italy by car. Not just any car I might add. The old Volvo clicked in 4.000 km and handled it like a charm 🥰 even when it was super packed for the final stage of the journey from the duty free shop just across the border.
Main cities visited Nürnberg, Venice, Bologna, Brisighella, Comacchio… and obviously I had to make a stop at the Mutti field of tomatoes, as Mutti is a client of ours 🙂
Assorted Pictures from the vacation
Just before the vacation began, I got notice, that I had passed the two beta exams I attended in the middle of May. With beta exams you do not get the passing score immediately, you have to wait ’till the program has collected enough data on the individual questions/answers to release the final version of the test.
Microsoft Power Automate RPA Developer (PL-500)
First of I passed the Microsoft Power Automate RPA Developer (PL-500) exam, which was quite a stretch for me, and I had even raised some concerns about the scope of the test before, in the below announcement on LinkedIn:
Candidates for this exam automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks by using Microsoft Power Automate (formerly known as Flow). They review solution requirements, create process documentation, and design, develop, troubleshoot, and evaluate solutions.
Candidates work with business stakeholders to improve and automate business workflows. They collaborate with administrators to deploy solutions to production environments, and they support solutions.
Additionally, candidates should have experience with JSON, cloud flows and desktop flows, integrating solutions with REST and SOAP services, analyzing data by using Microsoft Excel, VBScript, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), HTML, JavaScript, one or more programming languages, and the Microsoft Power Platform suite of tools (AI Builder, Power Apps, Dataverse, and Power Virtual Agents).
Designing and Implementing Enterprise-Scale Analytics Solutions Using Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Power BI (DP-500)
Candidates for this exam should have advanced Power BI skills, including managing data repositories and data processing in the cloud and on-premises, along with using Power Query and Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). They should also be proficient in consuming data from Azure Synapse Analytics and should have experience querying relational databases, analyzing data by using Transact-SQL (T-SQL), and visualizing data.
