A realistic six-week plan at roughly 9 to 10 hours per week. Keep a Microsoft Fabric workspace open (a trial capacity is available) and do every task hands-on. Add two weeks if you are new to Fabric.
| Week | Focus | Checkpoint |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Workspace settings, OneLake, item and workspace access, sensitivity labels | You can configure a workspace and set who sees what |
| 2 | Lifecycle: version control, database projects, deployment pipelines; orchestration | You can promote content and orchestrate a pipeline plus notebook |
| 3 | Ingestion: pipelines, Dataflows Gen2, shortcuts, mirroring; full vs incremental loads | You can land data into a Lakehouse reliably |
| 4 | Transform with PySpark, T-SQL and KQL; medallion layering and dimensional prep | You can clean and model data with the right tool |
| 5 | Streaming: Eventstreams, KQL windowing, Spark structured streaming | You can process and query a live stream |
| 6 | Monitoring, error resolution, optimisation; free practice assessment and timed reviews | You consistently pass timed reviews |
Final tips
The three skill areas are weighted almost evenly (30–35% each), so do not skip one - cover ingestion and transformation, security and lifecycle, and monitoring and optimisation equally. Spend real time on the tool-choice decisions (Lakehouse vs Warehouse, Dataflow Gen2 vs notebook vs pipeline) and on the security sub-types (workspace, item, row/column/object level, OneLake), because both come up repeatedly. Remember DP-700 is Microsoft Fabric, not the retired DP-203 (Azure Synapse / Data Factory), and not PL-300, which is the Power BI analyst exam. Avoid “exam dump” sites - they breach Microsoft policy and copyright.