Certification Requirements The NonStop Advanced Application Design Exam (HP0-786) is an elective for certification as an Accredited System Engineer (ase level 2) in the NonStop s-series Systems track. Prerequisites

Purpose of the Exam Prep Guide

Audience

• 
  Professional Services personnel who assist NonStop customers.
  

• 
  Global Customer Support Center (GCSC) personnel, who may have specialized technical expertise in the operating system and NonStop applications and serve as support for both field support technicians and customers.
  

• 
  Analyst SEs or Pre-SalesTechnical Support (PSTS) personnel, who perform pre-sales consulting and technical account support.
  

• 
  NonStop Application Designers (both internal and external), System Integrators and Consultant Partners, Authorized Service Channel Partners and Distributors, Customers authorized to service their own equipment.
  

General areas of content include: Requirements Review, Application Architecting, Engineering Solutions, and Product Knowledge.

Certification Requirements

Prerequisites

• 
  NonStop Kernel Advanced Exam HP0-760
  

Exam Details

Test Information

• 
  Number of test items: 77
  
• 
  Item type: multiple choice
  
• 
  Time commitment: 90 minutes
  
• 
  Passing Score: 53
  
• 
  Percent Correct: 68
  
• 
  Reference material: No online or hard copy reference material will be allowed at the testing site.
  

Exam Content

1. 
   Requirements Review
   

1. 
   Describe the purpose of the business requirements document
   
2. 
   Identify business requirement topics
   

• 
  Business functions
  
• 
  Business algorithms
  
• 
  Interoperability with external systems
  
• 
  Internationalization
  
• 
  Constraints
  
• 
  Security policy
  
• 
  Transaction volumes
  
• 
  Performance requirements
  
• 
  Availability requirements
  
• 
  Regulatory requirements
  
• 
  Schedule
  

1. 
   Identify constraints that may be arbitrary and should be removed
   
2. 
   Identify valid constraints before release for an application design
   
3. 
   Identify undocumented business requirements
   
4. 
   Explain the requirements change control process
   

• 
  Approval
  

• 
  Release
  

1. 
   Identify the components of the final business requirements
   
2. 
   Identify the components of the test requirements
   

• 
  Functional
  
• 
  Stress
  
• 
  Performance
  
• 
  Recovery
  
• 
  User acceptance
  
• 
  Interoperability
  

1. 
   Identify the documentation requirements
   
2. 
   Identify the system and/or application release management policy
   
3. 
   Identify the training requirements (not tested)
   

• 
  End user training
  
• 
  System management training
  
• 
  Operator training
  

2. 
   Application Architecting
   

• 
  Parallelism
  
• 
  Concurrency
  
• 
  Locking strategy
  

• 
  Network transactions
  
• 
  Transaction boundaries
  
• 
  Heterogeneous transactions
  
• 
  Recovery procedures
  

4. 
   Describe the conditions of a manageable application environment
   
5. 
   Describe the characteristics of a maintainable application
   
6. 
   Describe the various methodologies for providing interoperability
   

• 
  Messaging
  
• 
  Remote database
  
• 
  Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
  
• 
  Data conversion
  
• 
  Security
  

4. 
   Identify application security issues
   

• 
  Guardian
  
• 
  OSS
  
• 
  Web
  
• 
  Encryption
  
• 
  Network
  
• 
  Firewalls
  
• 
  Authentication/Authorization
  
• 
  Auditing
  
• 
  Regulatory
  

4. 
   Describe the methods and tools to achieve business continuity
   

• 
  Data replication
  
• 
  Application replication
  
• 
  Automatic communication switch
  
• 
  Prevention of data loss
  

4. 
   Identify potential performance problem areas
   

• 
  Bottlenecks
  
• 
  Network transactions
  
• 
  Network
  
• 
  Database
  
• 
  Memory/cache
  
• 
  Backups/online dump
  

4. 
   Discuss criteria for choosing a database architecture
   

• 
  SQL/MP
  
• 
  SQL/MX
  
• 
  Enscribe
  
• 
  OSS file system
  
• 
  Operational Data Store (ODS)
  
• 
  Decision Support System (DSS)
  

4. 
   Demonstrate knowledge of the different application types
   

• 
  Tiered
  
• 
  Distributed
  
• 
  Query
  
• 
  OLTP
  
• 
  Web
  
• 
  Batch
  

4. 
   Discuss considerations for communicating with remote systems
   

• 
  Protocols
  
• 
  Message formats
  
• 
  Message design
  
• 
  Middleware and protocol dependencies
  
• 
  Regulatory considerations
  
• 
  Cost
  

4. 
   Identify portability issues
   

• 
  NonStop enhancements
  
• 
  Non-standard enhancements
  
• 
  Choice of programming language
  
• 
  Choice of database
  
• 
  Version compatibility issues
  

• 
  Industry versus proprietary standards
  

4. 
   Discuss internalization issues
   

• 
  Character sets
  
• 
  Numerical representation
  
• 
  Currencies
  
• 
  Collating sequence
  
• 
  Date format
  
• 
  Time format
  
• 
  Time zones
  
• 
  Use of Greenwich Meridian Time (GMT) or Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)
  

4. 
   Discuss the different test phases of an application
   

• 
  Unit/module
  
• 
  Functional
  
• 
  Failure
  
• 
  Stress (Transaction)
  
• 
  Volume (Data)
  
• 
  Performance
  
• 
  Regression
  
• 
  User Acceptance
  
• 
  Disaster recovery
  

4. 
   Identify migration considerations
   

• 
  Web enabling
  
• 
  Coexistence (dumb terminals vs. intelligent clients)
  
• 
  SQL/MP to SQL/MX
  
• 
  Enscribe to SQL
  
• 
  Product versions
  
• 
  From other platforms
  
• 
  Application availability
  
• 
  Application migration
  
• 
  Non-TMF to TMF-enabled applications
  

4. 
   Demonstrate knowledge of sizing requirements
   

• 
  Transaction profile
  
• 
  Data volume
  
• 
  Batch
  
• 
  Large queries
  
• 
  Response time
  
• 
  Recovery time
  

4. 
   Indicate design methods to respond to short schedule application changes
   

• 
  Isolation
  
• 
  Modular
  
• 
  Web services
  
• 
  Parameterization
  
• 
  Data driven
  
• 
  Rules based
  

4. 
   Describe the reporting/printing capabilities of a NonStop server
   

• 
  Spooler
  
• 
  Font support
  
• 
  Report distribution
  
• 
  Broadcast
  
• 
  Spooler file replication
  

4. 
   Describe the deliverables from the application architecting process
   

• 
  Internal specification
  
• 
  External specification
  
• 
  Test specification
  

3. 
   Engineering Solutions
   

• 
  Request/reply handling
  
• 
  Internal error handling
  
• 
  External error handling
  
• 
  Logging
  
• 
  Instrumentation and metrics
  
• 
  Debugging and tracing
  
• 
  Security (authorization, auditing, encryption)
  
• 
  Database referential integrity support
  
• 
  Runtime management
  
• 
  Initialization and parameterization
  
• 
  Resource pooling/sharing
  
• 
  Restart/recovery
  

• 
  Quality (standardized and tested)
  
• 
  Productivity (reuse and maintenance)
  

• 
  Skills deployment
  

• 
  Limiting choice for framework users and enforcing decisions
  

• 
  Project and application standards
  
• 
  Portability
  
• 
  Flexibility and maintenance
  
• 
  Database integrity enforcement
  

• 
  Module layering
  
• 
  Isolation libraries
  
• 
  Use of standard APIs
  
• 
  Cohesion and coupling management
  

• 
  Source library-based
  
• 
  Object library-based
  
• 
  Tool-based generation
  
• 
  Buy, share, or develop
  

• 
  Pathway – user provided
  
• 
  Tuxedo – request handling/security/etc.
  
• 
  NonStop Enterprise Application Server (EAS)
  

• 
  ZLE Development Kit (ZDK)
  
• 
  iTP WebServer
  
• 
  CORBA
  

• 
  Internationalization
  
• 
  Back-end connectivity
  
• 
  Heterogeneous transactions
  
• 
  High concurrency clients
  
• 
  Long-running sessions
  
• 
  Long-running transactions
  
• 
  Specialized clients (legacy and custom protocols)
  

• 
  High throughput techniques (boxcarring, multi-buffering, log file and intermediate file handling)
  

4. 
   Product Knowledge
   

1. 
   Demonstrate detailed knowledge of NonStop server middleware
   

• 
  Pathway/TS and NonStop TS/MP
  
• 
  NonStop Tuxedo
  
• 
  NonStop CORBA
  
• 
  NonStop EAS
  
• 
  iTP WebServer
  
• 
  Pathway/iTS
  
• 
  NonStop DCE
  
• 
  ODBC and ODBC/MX
  
• 
  JDBC and JDBC/MX
  
• 
  RSC/MP
  

1. 
   Demonstrate detailed knowledge of NonStop server languages and language support tools
   

• 
  C
  
• 
  C++
  
• 
  Java
  
• 
  COBOL (native, non-native)
  
• 
  TAL/pTAL
  
• 
  HTML
  
• 
  JavaScript
  
• 
  XML (SOAP)
  
• 
  SCOBOL
  
• 
  TACL
  
• 
  SQLCI
  
• 
  MXCI
  
• 
  Enform
  

1. 
   Demonstrate knowledge of NonStop server database products
   

• 
  NonStop SQL/MP
  
• 
  NonStop SQL/MX
  
• 
  Enscribe (DDL)
  
• 
  OSS file system
  
• 
  DDl (Message definition language, token definitions, DDL to Java)
  
• 
  DataLoader/MP
  
• 
  DBA/M
  
• 
  Enable
  
• 
  VQP (Visual Query Planner)
  

1. 
   Demonstrate knowledge of NonStop server communications products
   

• 
  TCP/IP and parallel TCP/IP
  
• 
  X.25
  
• 
  SNA
  
• 
  ATM
  
• 
  SuperCluster
  
• 
  Expand
  

• 
  TMF
  
• 
  BACKUP and RESTORE
  
• 
  RDF
  
• 
  AutoSYNC
  
• 
  AutoTMF
  
• 
  Pax
  
• 
  PAK/UNPAK (G06.16)
  

• 
  EMS
  
• 
  SPI
  
• 
  ASAP
  
• 
  NetBatch
  
• 
  Spooler
  
• 
  SNMP Agent
  
• 
  Measure (application instrumentation)
  

• 
  Safeguard
  
• 
  Atalla
  
• 
  Web security
  
• 
  Guardian and OSS