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Test Information

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"Netezza does what it says on the tin."

Test Information

A Netezza Certified Specialist drives the design, implementation and support of applications on the Netezza platform. This individual has experience designing Netezza systems in accordance with the best practices of ETL, BI, data modeling, and analytical solutions.

Exam Number: 000-553
Exam Name: IBM Certified Specialist Netezza Platform Software v6.0

Recommended Pre-requisites:

• Knowledge and experience managing Netezza applications
• Knowledge of SQL fundamentals within Netezza applications
• Experience in data warehouse industry best practices
• Basic understanding of Linux and UNIX
• Netezza Data Warehouse Appliance Usage Course (3 Days)
• Netezza Data Warehouse Advanced Concepts Courses (2 Days)

Test information:

• Number of questions: 67
• Time allowed in minutes: 90
• Required passing score: 65%

Section 1 – Database Design (16%)

1. Ability to design, create and manage databases and database objects (tables, views, etc.)
2. Ability to create and manage users and groups
3. Knowledge of the Netezza schema concept
4. Demonstrate the ability to design, implement and maintain materialized views
5. Knowledge of the benefits of clustered based tables
6. Demonstrate knowledge and application of sequences
7. Demonstrate knowledge and application of synonyms
8. Demonstrate knowledge of zone maps
9. Demonstrate knowledge of and application of data types
10. Demonstrate knowledge of table defaults and constraints

Section 2 – Physical Optimization (15%)

1. Demonstrate knowledge of data distribution and skew
2. Ability to select an appropriate data distribution key
3. Knowledge of Netezza implementation of temporary tables
4. Demonstrate knowledge of optimizer settings
5. Ability to maintain statistics and knowledge of impact on performance
6. Demonstrate the ability to correctly size system for capacity planning
7. Ability to utilize groom table feature and knowledge of impact on performance and storage

Section 3 – Netezza Appliance Components (9%)

1. Knowledge of the IBM® Netezza® 1000 architecture and disks/dataslices
2. Ability to identify the number of disks/dataslices on a system
3. Knowledge of the appliance architecture (FPGA, SPU, Disk Array, etc.)

Section 4 – High Availability Architecture (6%)

1. Demonstrate knowledge of Linux High Availability (HA) and Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD)
2. Knowledge of behavior of nzLoad and query processing with a state change (host, disk, blade)

Section 5 - Security (6%)

1. Knowledge of access/privilege database objects
2. Knowledge of using Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
3. Knowledge of Linux system administration
4. Knowledge of query history and audit

Section 6 – Connectivity and Networking (3%)

1. Demonstrate Knowledge of ODBC/JDBC in a Unix or Windows environment
2. Demonstrate Knowledge of OLE-DB connectivity

Section 7 – Data Movement (12%)

1. Demonstrate ability to use external tables in loading and unloading data
2. Demonstrate ability to use backup/restore utilities
3. Demonstrate ability to perform inserts (external tables vs cross system)
4. Demonstrate ability to design cross database access
5. Demonstrate ability to use nzload

Section 8 – Monitoring and Performance (21%)

1. Demonstrate knowledge of log files
2. Demonstrate knowledge of locks with update, delete, insert, and select
3. Demonstrate knowledge of transactions that use temporary tables
4. Demonstrate knowledge of system views
5. Ability to describe Workload Management capabilities
6. Describe alerts
7. Describe data flow
8. Describe life of a query
9. Demonstrate knowledge of compression
10. Demonstrate knowledge of plans (query, execution)
11. Describe join processing (hashjoin, cross-db join, etc.)
12. Demonstrate knowledge of broadcasts
13. Demonstrate knowledge of co-location/redistribute
14. Demonstrate knowledge of data skew

Section 9 – Application Development Environment (3%)

1. Describe stored procedures
2. Knowledge of User Defined Functions (UDF) and User Defined Aggregates (UDA)

Section 10 – Troubleshooting (3%)

1. Demonstrate knowledge of directory location (log files)
2. Demonstrate knowledge of nzdumpschema

Section 11 – Operations (6%)

1. Ability to manage the system using the command line interface
2. Demonstrate knowledge of NZ_ default environment settings