Customer Reviews

MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-448): Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance (Self-Paced Training Kits)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a wonderful comprehensive review of the key components used for SQL Server 2008 certification (exam 70-448). It covers SSIS, SSAS and SSRS in such a manner as to provide great background alongside some basic hands-on exercises to perform.

There is a practice exam disc included with the book which really helps in terms of studying for the exam and another disc with an evaluation copy of SQL Server 2008. All of this can take you from doing what I would call "cowboy SQL work" to a more professional, well founded, and optimized approach towards working with BI tools used with SQL Server.

The authors provide some good practical real-life recommendations on how to apply some of the techniques covered which helps round out the training. Collectively, this text has opened my eyes to more features and functionality in SQL than I did before picking it up and offers a way to actually apply the learning material -- albeit at a simple, high level. Just the same, one can always go deeper and experiment with some of the techniques. In the first chapter alone I learned of a technique that solved a problem which a consulting firm I worked with had an allergic reaction towards solving. I'm thinking the consulting firm might have benefited from this book.

I'm grateful that a careful reading of the exercises does allow one to complete the the vast majority of exercises and not have to deal with a problem so often faced in similar type texts -- nobody proof-read the thing to make sure the commands were accurate and actually worked! Seems like a pretty basic concept but this is so often not the case.

My only warnings to readers is that initial installation of the SQL Server evaluation software and setting up the DB's used as examples can prove tricky (but this is a MSFT issue, not one with the book or the way in which the conveys information). Why is it that sample DB's and installation of same cannot be made easier as it was with SQL 2005 early on? And I have a bit of a bone to pick regarding the Measure Up practice exam which has some out of synch references to the materials in the book. For example, the exam references Chapter 1 Lesson 5 yet the book has only 3 lessons in Chapter 1.

Finally, in the back of the book is a coupon code for taking the exam -- practically worth the price of the book. Your biggest investment will be the time necessary to study for the exam but in today's economy that would be a great investment to make.

Great book. I thought the layout was well done and flowed very logically. The examples, if studied carefully, provided good insight to the concepts and the functionality that is available in the BI stack. There is a lot of material on the exam and I'm impressed at how much was able to be packed into the 600 or so pages. One definitely has to work the examples to get the full understanding, though.

I do have to say that, to me, one of the drawbacks of the book was the set of practice exam questions that was included. I thought the questions were good enough, but the explanations were lacking. There wasn't enough detail as to why the answers were right or wrong. I've always used the Transcender exams to supplement any written material so that may be causing some of the bias, but I thought the explanations could have gone deeper than they did.

(Side note: I also purchased the Transcender exams for this exam. The combination of book and exam prep worked well for me. Passed the exam on the first try!)

I would definitely recommend purchasing the book. It not only met my expectation of an exam prep book, but it will also stay on my shelf as a reference book.

I bought this book with the intention of using it and the practice exams included to study for my 70-448 exam, and I couldn't be more pleased with it. I passed the exam and I owe a lot of my success on the exam to this book. Without this book I would have not known which areas to study and passing the test would have been much harder. The book is organized very well, is well written, and prepares you to perform well on the exam. I have been using the MS BI tools for several years now so I didn't intend to get much out of the book besides a passing score on the exam, but I ended up learning about quite a few things I had never utilized in each of the tools. Good luck to anyone taking this exam!

This book provides a good preparation for MCTS exam. It concisely addresses topics examined in the exam. It successfully avoids the temptation of going into too much details but covers everything necessary to be succesful in the exam. It is absolutely a good book to get the certification.

I am glad this book is available as it is one of the few sources of information for the 70-448. I personally used this book to use to study for the upgrade exams where I could not find specific books for the test.

I enjoyed reading the book and it suited my needs well. I recommed that any person interested in BI start with this book, create a good foundation of knowledge, build best practices and then progress to individual books based on their focused are of study. For example WROX SSIS 2008 would be a great companion as a reference guide. I am disappointed that the MS exams do not focus on each specific technology, but that is a complaint of MS certs, not this book. This book is a wonderful guide for the information contained in their exams. For a newbie to SSIS SSAS SSRS, or a person seeking information for an upgrade exam, no other book comes close.

Effective though I didn't appear exam so far. Covered a lot of topics effective for exam. But to do professional work I believe books for SSIS, SSAS and SSAS data mining are necessary individually. Data mining(Chapter 9) contents are too brief to understand. Best practice and Exam tips are really helpful. Also real life case examples are helpful. As a novice this is a good book to study.

Book includes 200 sample questions and SQL server 2008 E/E CD for 180 days trial.

The "Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Training Kit" series was highly recommended to me by an Instructor. I agree with the Instructor's recommendation. The Microsoft Training Kit series includes sample exams that also give you the following info. after you've completed the exam: 1) detailed explanations (with additional references) for the correct answers, 2) an assessment of your total score and the areas to concentrate on to improve your score. --- My money was sell spent. --- Lynne

Having gone through the first 8 chapters, I feel I've learned quite a bit from this training kit and especially the practice exercises. But in performing Exercise 1 of Chapter 9's Lesson 1 practice, I found that the GeographyKey of every record in DimCustomer is NULL. As a result, the view vDMPrep (which is defined as an inner join on GeographyKey to DimGeography) returns no records, as do vTargetMail, vTimeSeries, vAssocSeqOrders, and vAssocSeqLineItems (all of which use vDMPrep in their definitions).

It appears this error was reported to Microsoft Press on October 25, 2010 by jomaweb, according to the O'Reilly web site. It would be nice if O'Reilly or Microsoft Press could respond with the status of this error.

I also had the SQL Server 2005 sample database AdventureWorksDW installed in my server instance, so I was able to import the GeographyKey data from that database in order to proceed with the rest of Chapter 9. (I have provided more details in a comment attached to this review.)

Simply, this book helped me pass certification exam 70-448.

The structure is patterned after official Microsoft classroom training (6235A/SSIS, 6234A/SSAS & 6236A/SSRS) overlapping most of the content from all three courses. It is reasonably comprehensive in its coverage of the exam objectives but not intended as reference substitute versus separate books dedicated to SSIS/SSAS/SSRS.

The writing is wordy and somewhat repetitive, and most important, the R2 sample database needs tweaking to suit the exercises (although this is more of a Microsoft issue). But overall, this book is well-written, effective, and unambiguous from an examinee standpoint. Best of luck in your preparations.

Ever figured, books for exams are always boring? This is not! It's worth looking at with the kindle edition, search results filtered from topic and key words. This book with an active mind is sure fired way to certification of Microsoft's BI exam - well worth a few hours - the exam is not that expensive and adds something valuable to state of mind and MCDBA's are even more important today then ever! Entity Framework is for developers following MVC web development, these guys are going to be depending on certified B.I professionals, this is the key to holding that claim.