This blog is written on my own experience on studying and taking the Datastax Apache Cassandra exam on July 2023.
Introduction for the certificate
This certificate is issued by a data company — DataStax. Its main product Astra DB is a cloud database-as-a-service based on Apache Cassandra. And currently, this is the only certificate for Cassandra in the industry. More detail: https://www.datastax.com/dev/certifications
Studying Materials
According to datastax, it is adviced that you take both DS201 and DS220 courses. The videos are provided on both datastax learing website and youtube. The advantage of watching on youtube is that you can play it at a faster speed.
- DS201: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2g2h-wyI4Spf5rzSmesewHpXYVnyQ2TS
- DS220: https://youtu.be/jYvKiewV-5Q
Also, practice these 20 sample questions from datastax workshop and make sure you understand them 100%. These question types are very very similar to the actual exam questions.
Claim exam vouchers for free
You can have two free attempts by completing one of the learning paths (Deveopler or Administrator) on Datastax.
Disclaimer: We don’t know when will this benefits ends, please refer to Datastax website for the newest update.
I received an email with a coupon code a week after I send the mail to Datastax, the mail contains the information below, and they gave me more than 3 months to use this coupon:
By following the instructions in the mail, you’ll be led to the page where to choose which certificate to take:
Before making payment, use the coupon code. Remember, the same code can be use twice!
Setup the environment for the exam
Do the Computer System Check first, you’ll need a computer with a camera, but microphone is not necessary. You’ll have to share your screen during the whole exam period.
View the result summary of the score
After the exam, you can view the result immediately. My first attempt failed, the passing score was 70%, which means 42 out of 60 questions should be answered correctly. The summary showed that I’m weak at some CQL questions, but the way it categorized my score didn’t help a lot.
I suggest memorizing the questions that you are not sure about while taking the exam, and look up the correct answer right after the exam for your first attempt. In my experience, there were about 20% of questions duplicated in my second attempt, and this led to my successful attempt on the second try.