270 folks took MySQL Certification exams in July and 118 earned certifications. This is our best month outside of our annual Users Conference. For the fiscal year, MySQL Certifications were up 150.27% over the previous year.

Since the program inception, we had almost 8,000 exams taken and over 3,300 certifications. Not bad but it pales in comparison to Java exams and certifications.

Prometric is our new testing partner. Those of you with unexpired Pearson VUE vouchers can request a exchange by contacting Certification@sun.com with your Voucher ID number. And those of you wishing to sign up for the exams (they are part of the Sun 310-series at http://www.prometric.com/Sun/default.htm) need to contact you local Sun sales office to purchase a voucher.

And the North Texas MySQL Users Group meets tonight -- see http://www.northtexasmysql.org for details.

2008 was a good year for MySQL Certification. 1,986 folks took exams which is a 14.6% gain over 2007. 736 candidates earned certifications and that is a 14.4% gain. The biggest gains were in Associate (up 300%) and DBA (up 35%) certifications. Oddly the Developer cert was down 40%.

So what happens in 2009?

The DBA and Developer exams are both changing format to performance based tests. Candidates will be tested on a virtual server and provided with a list of tasks that need to be accomplished. The DBA exam is actually in alpha est and about to go to beta. This testing is being done on two sets of virtual environments which provide their own qualities. The Linux environment is probably closer to what most DBA's working environment but the Windows version allows the candidate more control over the system. More news here later in the month.

Computer certifications will take …