In conjunction with my professional development plan, on June 1st I took the 70-448 exam: SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance, which I passed. Hazzah!

With most of my SQL Server career involving SSIS and SSRS, I  felt comfortable in those areas. I have only done a little bit of SSAS, so I knew that was where my prep needed focus. I ended up using the Microsoft Press Self-Paced Training Kit as my main preparation tool. I read pretty much all of it, making sure to learn more about SSIS and SSRS tools and techniques I had not played with. For the SSAS areas, I also performed all of the hands on practice exercises. This helped a lot in making up for not having a lot of SSAS experience. Overall, I found this book to be a very good prep tool and would recommend it to others who are looking to take the 70-448 exam. Also, I found the exam had really good balance between SSIS, SSRS, and SSAS. I had heard from colleagues that the 2005 version was not as well balanced.

In passing the exam (by a much better margin than I expected), I accomplished my main goal for taking it: measuring how much I have learned in the BI space. And I picked up a new MCTS cert in the process. Not a bad day.

Now that this exam, and the prep for it, are behind me, I am digging deeper into SQL 2008 R2. I just set up my Windows 7 laptop to dual boot Server 2008 R2. I set up Hyper V and have a VM with SQL Server 2008 R2 installed and configured. Looking forward to digging in. A Sharepoint colleague also sent me the link to the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine (RTM). I will be using that to play with the new SSRS features of R2 that related to Sharepoint 2010.

Mmmmmmmm….more learning…mmmmmmmm