Comparison
DP-600 vs DP-700
Fabric Analytics Engineer and Fabric Data Engineer, compared on who they are for and what they test, from each exam's own official outline.
DP-600
Exam page ↗Fabric Analytics Engineer
Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate
- For
- Analytics engineers who build semantic models, warehouses and lakehouses
- Exam time
- 100 minutes, 50 questions
- Works with
- SQL, KQL and DAX
DP-700
Exam page ↗Fabric Data Engineer
Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate
- For
- Data engineers who build pipelines in Microsoft Fabric
- Exam time
- 100 minutes, 50 questions
- Works with
- SQL, PySpark and KQL
Exam domains
Where the exam time goes
The domains each exam's official skills outline lists, and the share of the exam Microsoft assigns to each one.
DP-600
- Maintain a data analytics solution 25-30%
- Prepare data 45-50%
- Implement and manage semantic models 25-30%
DP-700
- Implement and manage an analytics solution 30-35%
- Ingest and transform data 30-35%
- Monitor and optimize an analytics solution 30-35%
Verdict
Which one first
DP-600's single biggest domain, Prepare data at 45-50% of the exam, already spans the whole Fabric surface: getting data in, transforming it, and querying it with SQL, KQL and DAX. DP-700 instead splits evenly across three domains built entirely around pipelines: implementing the analytics solution, ingesting and transforming data, and monitoring and optimizing it. If your work is modeling data for reporting, start with DP-600. If it is building and running ingestion pipelines, including streaming, start with DP-700. If you are new to Fabric and not sure which role you will end up in, DP-600's broader first domain makes it the gentler on-ramp, with DP-700 a natural second step into deeper pipeline engineering.