MongoDB Data Modeler Certification Tips

I just became a MongoDB Certified Associate Data Modeler 🎉
Giving certification exams can be a wonderful experience. This article contains information to help you prepare for MongoDB Associate Data Modeler Certification exam.

About the exam

This is an online proctored exam, conducted by Examity as of writing of this article. The exam consists of 70 Multiple Choice Questions out of which 60 count toward your score. The remaining 10 are there for testing new variants & do not count. But you won’t know which ones are for testing.

The content focuses on skills for designing efficient data models according to business & technical requirements. Evolving them as the application progresses & their further analysis.

Free certification for students

You can get a free attempt at the exam with the GitHub Developer Student Pack, after completing Data Modeler Learning Path on MongoDB University. If you don’t have a student status, you can still get a significant discount on exam fees by completing the learning path. This doesn’t apply just to Modeler Learning path but all certification learning paths. You can view them all here.

Once you complete the learning path you will receive an email with the discount code along with its expiration date. You have to purchase exam before that. But you can schedule the exam according to your availability even after the expiration date. MongoDB also permits rescheduling the exam without any extra charge, provided that you do it before the exam time.

Learning path on MongoDB University

I found the learning path provides a good overall picture of the topic but it alone won’t suffice for clearing the exam. The path contains courses with labs & quizzes. The questions here don’t match the level of the actual exam but are just to test the understanding of content in videos.

All the courses on MongoDB University are free. So feel free to explore whatever catches your fancy. If you’d like to get more comfortable with MongoDB first before the learning path, the Introduction to MongoDB learning path is quite a good one.

Helpful Resources & Tips

• A technique that I found helpful is to examine the topics listed in Associate Data Modeler Exam Study Guide and then check MongoDB Manual for any topics that seem unfamiliar.
• This article on DEV.to by Jonatan Kruszewski is an amazing guide & contains useful information and tips for the exam.
• The MongoDB Build with Patterns blog series is an amazing resource for learning about Schema Design Patterns.
• Instead of memorizing concepts just focus on understanding them, as most of the questions are application based.
• Be sure to cover all Schema Design, Indexes & their types (like sparse, TTL, partial, etc)
• Learn all the different ways you could model relationships in MongoDB for example, for one to many there are multiple ways like embedding, references, parent references, etc. This article on MongoDB blog covers it quite well.
• Understand JSON Schema validation & the effects of ValidationLevel & ValidationAction fields.