Today Giuseppe pointed me to Hot skills: MySQL 5.1, an article in ComputerWeekly.com.

The takeaway from the Gartner report quoted?

• Gartner published a report titled “The Growing Maturity of Open-Source Database Management Systems” in November 2008, and found that there was a 50% increase from 2007 to 2008 in the usage of open source DBMS’s in production.
• “Gartner says the major open source DBMSs are now available for installation as packages, without involving the source code, and include tools to help support administrators and managers.” I’d like to state that, MySQL has always been available in packaged format, and you don’t need to fudge with the source code if you do not want to. In fact, its available on all your distributions as well.
• …

The Pythian Group added another feather to its cap today. Our Nicklas Westerlund passed his MySQL Cluster DBA Certification exam, making him part of an elite group of 57 MySQL Cluster Certified DBAs worldwide, and now two here at Pythian, the other being Augusto Bott. We have a wealth of hands-on experience setting up and maintaining the MySQL Cluster. Nick’s and Augusto’s certified creds make them our go-to guys for MySQL Clustering.

Congratulations, Nick!

Certification Magazine has published their 2008 salary survey. But it is more than just a salary survey. Responses from more than 150 countries revealed some very interesting information.

Who has the certifications: 60% percent of those surveyed were in their current job for less than four years. The majority were in IT for less than a decade. But the majority had at least three certifications:

Who paid: 48.3% have their employers pay for their certifications.

How did they study for their exams: Over 48% used self-study books. Practice exams and on-the-job training were used by over 66%. About 75% viewed their prep materials as good or better.

What are they being paid: Figure 7 …

Certifications are "in". Nowadays you can get certifications for almost every aspect of life. Admittedly, some of those certs you can just get by surviving a boring day in a classroom or more luckily for having joined a 2 week 20k yacht trip offshore hawaii that was just regularly interrupted by attending conference speaches, workshops or lessons.

Continue reading "Getting Certified with MySQL"

Why are the best technical books also the thinnest? To make the case, I highly recommend the MySQL 5.1 Cluster Certification Study Guide In rack units, it’s a 1U; it fits nicely into my laptop bag; and if you’re considering implementing MySQL Cluster, it can save you a world of time.

Of course, if you get the book, you should consider the certification itself. There’s a legitimate debate about the usefulness of certification exams, but the MySQL 5.1 Cluster certification is a little more important than others for a couple of reasons:

1. In case you haven’t heard it by now, Cluster isn’t always the best fit. In many cases, an active/passive failover setup is a much more flexible and cost-effective approach. It’s not always a clear-cut decision. If you’re willing to make application changes …

You have only a few more days to sign up for the MySQL Conference and Expo before the early-bird discount goes away. Check out the schedule of speakers and tutorials, and sign up soon! And just in case you didn't get one from any of the other people blogging about it, you can email me for a code that's good for a 20% discount.

I'm presenting two sessions: one on the query cache, and one on EXPLAIN. Both are manageable for an hour-or-so talk. I'm not trying to boil the ocean, but rather to help you understand these important topics in ways you'll remember after leaving the conference.

I was also on the voting committee for the proposals, so I've read them all. I really believe this event is worth every penny. (Of course, as a speaker, it doesn't cost me... but I digress).

While …

Mark writes:

At the 2007 conference, they had certification tutorials for CMDBA I and II, along with MySQL Cluster . I attended the CMDBA tutorials, both tracks and it was excellent. It was also packed with attendees, and I can say what I learned there helped me greatly in passing both exams. You should know, only about a third of the attendees taking the CMDBA I exam, and about half taking the CMDBA II exam passed last year. The last years final numbers can be found …