NCM-DB study guide
NCM-DB · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
NCM-DB is a professional certification for database administrators and engineers who need to demonstrate working competence across the full lifecycle of a database platform: designing it, installing and configuring it, organizing its storage and schema objects, writing and tuning SQL, protecting it through backup and high availability, monitoring its performance, and securing it through users, privileges, and auditing. It suits DBAs moving from task-level familiarity to end-to-end ownership, as well as developers and systems engineers whose work depends on a reliable database layer. The NCM-DB study guide has 7 sections and about 2,085 words.
01Database Architecture, Concepts, and Design
This domain tests how you reason about a database as layered architecture: the instance (memory plus background processes) versus the database (persistent files), the engine's concurrency model, and how logical design choices such as normalization, indexing, and partitioning map onto Nutanix Database Service (NDB) provisioning and placement decisions. An instance is the running memory and process footprint; a database is the set of physical files.
331 words, about 2 min02Installation, Configuration, and Instance Management
This domain covers the NDB provisioning workflow and the day-2 operations that keep database instances healthy: registering clusters, building profiles, provisioning database server VMs (DSVMs), and managing lifecycle actions such as start, stop, patch, clone, scale, and delete. Software profile: engine type and version plus the OS image.
310 words, about 2 min03Storage Structures, Tablespaces, and Schema Objects
This domain tests how physical storage structures and logical schema objects interact, and how NDB maps them onto Nutanix storage constructs such as vDisks, volume groups, and storage policies. Engine files include datafiles, redo/transaction logs, control files, and archive logs.
300 words, about 2 min04SQL and Query Processing
This domain tests SQL semantics and how engines turn a statement into an execution plan. NDB does not run SQL itself; it manages engines, so you must recognize optimizer behavior across Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
298 words, about 1 min05Backup, Recovery, and High Availability
This domain tests recovery-point and recovery-time design: NDB SLAs, snapshots, log backups, point-in-time recovery, clones, and the boundary between storage redundancy and database-level high availability. A snapshot alone gives a crash-consistent or application-consistent copy at a point in time.
280 words, about 1 min06Performance Tuning and Monitoring
This domain tests layered diagnosis: is the bottleneck in SQL, the engine, the VM, the Nutanix storage layer, or the network? You must read the right metric before changing a parameter.
271 words, about 1 min07Security, User Management, and Auditing
This domain tests least-privilege access across two planes: the NDB control plane (who can provision, clone, or delete) and the database engine plane (who can read or change data). Auditing must cover both.
295 words, about 1 min