DP-600 study plan

Your step-by-step plan

1. Map the blueprint and book a date

   Day 1

   Read the official DP-600 skills outline and the three domains with their weights. Book a provisional date now, because a fixed date turns open-ended study into a plan and is the strongest predictor of actually sitting. Note that Prepare Data is the largest domain by a wide margin, so weight your time toward store choice, ingestion, transformation, and querying first.

2. Learn the Fabric store and ingestion decisions

   Week 1

   Spend the first week building the store decision until it is automatic: a Lakehouse for files, Delta, and Spark with a read-only SQL analytics endpoint, a Warehouse for a fully transactional T-SQL store, an Eventhouse and KQL database for real-time events. Practise ingestion choice across an on-premises data gateway for private sources, shortcuts to reference data in place, Dataflows Gen2 for low-code transformation, and notebooks for Spark-scale work.

3. Go deep on preparation and querying

   Weeks 2 to 3

   Prepare Data is the heaviest domain, so it gets the most time. Build star schemas in a Lakehouse and Warehouse, add pre-aggregated summary tables beside detailed facts, and rehearse cleansing behaviours such as selecting the key column before Remove Duplicates in Dataflows Gen2. Practise querying with the Visual Query Editor and SQL against the SQL analytics endpoint, KQL against an Eventhouse, and DAX table functions inside EVALUATE, knowing FILTER preserves all native columns.

4. Master semantic models and storage modes

   Week 4

   Drill the storage-mode decision: Direct Lake for OneLake Delta freshness with in-memory speed and no copy or scheduled refresh, import for cached speed with a refresh, DirectQuery for live source queries, dual for a blend. Learn the large semantic model storage format as the lever that lifts an import model past its default ceiling, and how a composite model chained by DirectQuery honours the source model's row-level security. Practise advanced DAX with calculation groups, dynamic format strings, and field parameters, plus incremental refresh policy design.

5. Master maintenance, security, and the lifecycle

   Week 5

   Memorise the cumulative workspace role hierarchy until least-privilege choice is automatic, with Contributor as the lowest authoring role and Admin alone holding governance. Learn the lifecycle split: Git integration for branch-based version control reconciled with Commit and Update, deployment pipelines with deployment rules for stage promotion. Rehearse row-level, column-level, object-level, and file-level security across lakehouses, warehouses, and semantic models, plus sensitivity labels and endorsement.

6. Drill weak domains, then space the review

   Week 6

   Use your per-domain accuracy to attack the domains dragging you down rather than re-reading what you already know. Then space it: revisit each domain's recall prompts after a few days and again a week later. Spacing roughly doubles what sticks compared with cramming the night before, and the heaviest domain deserves a second pass.

7. Sit a timed mock and calibrate

   Weeks 6 to 7

   Take at least one full timed mock under exam conditions to rehearse pacing and the flag-and-return habit. Treat the score as a per-domain readiness signal, not a single number, and review every missed question, naming the exact documented behaviour you misread and why the least-overhead option was correct, before you book or sit.

Frequently asked questions