Practice, practice!

There is an old joke about the concert violinist on his first visit to New York City who finds himself lost and late for rehearsal. So he asks a police officer, "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?"

The cop answers, "Practice, practice!"

If you new to the world of databases (or MySQL's world of databases) and want to do well on your MySQL certification tests, one of the best things you can do to internalize the knowledge needed is to practice. And the best practice tool is out there for free at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/ under Example Databases.

The MySQL Student Guides from our excellent training classes and our Certification Guides use the World database in their examples. I encourage you to type in the examples and work through any exercises our questions with this wonderful collection of tables.

Then work up your own exercises. Write a query to display the head of state and capital from each country or find the average population for each square mile and kilometer.

Many of us learned to program in C by typing in the K&R 'Hello world' program (and not doing it right the first time). Working through the examples is worth the time and effort.

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It is almost time to send out a quarterly newsletter to those of you on the MySQL Certification E-mail list. There are lots of things to be covered such as certifications at the Users Conference, how Sun's purchase of MySQL will make subtle changes in the certification program, and exciting things that I can not even hint about right now.

But are there anything you want to know or want emphasized?

Remember there is no such item 'dumb question', unless you ask how to get to Carnegie Hall