It’s a PASS! This week I successfully renewed my Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer certification. Yay for me, because this one is not easy.
This professional certification requires a real closed-book test either at a designated place or at home, proctored (being watched over camera and screen monitoring). No asking GPT in the extra monitor, no using the tool, nada.
I already had this certification, so this time was to renew things. It was to done every two years. But just the fact that you need to go to a secure location, they take away your phone, your watch (I had a Fitbit that was text message capable), it’s intimidating.
Notes About The Exam
The exam is fair. It’s impossible to know all the domains in detail, but it does force you to have a basic idea of all the offerings and how they work. For example, Bigtable, Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, BigQuery, Firestore… all databases with different flavours. I mainly use BigQuery, but the exam forces you to review the others. Cloud Storage too, of course.
Last time they had more about machine learning, but this time much less as there is a Machine Learning designation.
Processes and data manipulation are also on the menu – Data Flow, Cloud Composer, Data Fusion, Pub/Sub in particular seems to be growing in importance because of streaming data’s rise. I’m so sad that Dataprep is no longer free.
Security and management as a renewed emphasis going beyond IAM. Dataplex is being position as the main tool for governance.
There is more, of course. But regardless of what I write here I feel the environment will be much different as the industry matures.
If you’re going for the exam. Good luck!
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