Exam Tips
Memory tricks, common gotchas, and quick-recall summaries. Review this page the night before your exam.
📋 Exam Quick Facts
📊 Study Priority by Weight
🧠 All Memory Tricks
Managed Identity for auth · ACR Tasks for cloud builds · Premium for geo-rep + signing
Containerized serverless · Revisions · Event-driven scaling (KEDA) · Dapr · Scale-to-zero
Control plane = free · Helm for deploy · User + System pools · Networking = Azure CNI · Kubectl
Partition key = most important · RU = currency · Embeddings via DiskANN · VectorDistance() · Indexing auto · Event via Change Feed · Writes = 5-6x reads
HNSW = better accuracy (prod) · IVFFlat = less memory (needs data) · Cosine <=> for text
Semantic caching · All in-memory · Vector search (Enterprise) · Event streams · Session store + cache-aside
Service Bus = bank transfer (reliable, ordered) · Event Grid = news broadcast (reactive, fast)
Key Vault = secrets safe (encrypted) · App Config = settings dashboard (environment config) · Connect with Key Vault references
Where = filter (SQL WHERE) · Summarize = aggregate (GROUP BY) · Project = columns (SELECT)
⚠️ Top Exam Gotchas
ACR Admin user is disabled by default — never use in production. Answer is always Managed Identity.
Cosmos DB partition key cannot be changed after container creation. Must recreate and migrate.
Change feed does NOT capture deletes. Use soft-delete pattern.
IVFFlat index requires data before building. HNSW can be built on empty tables.
Redis vector search requires Enterprise tier. Basic/Standard/Premium won't work.
Key Vault purge protection is irreversible once enabled.
KQL pipe order is opposite to SQL: where (filter) → summarize (group) → project (select).
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