North Texas Meetup 7/7 at 7PM

Please join us at the North Texas MySQL Meetup if you are in the Dallas area this coming Monday July 7th, at 7PM. This is our first time at the Sun Office (Mansions 1 and 2 rooms of the Sun Office, 16000 Dallas Parkway, Ste 700, Dallas, TX Dallas, TX 75248). We have been a good little group but now we need more room to hold more bodies. And the location should be better for those in Dallas.

There will be a short presentation on Getting Started with MySQL and Studying for the Certified MySQL Associate Certification and will be followed with a general 'round table' discussion.

Anyone interested in MySQL is welcome but please RSVP at http://mysql.meetup.com/250/

And the next night is the DallasPHP.org meeting -- a great resource for all levels of PHP coders. A blub from their website The Dallas area has many highly experienced PHP developers, and is adding new developers all the time. This July, the greybeards of DallasPHP are going to cover the PHP basics, talking you through the fundamentals of PHP, its history, and pointing out some of the obscure artifacts still lingering around in the language. If you're new to PHP or just want to talk about how it came to be what it is, join us this month.

Maybe we can chip in and buy those 'graybears' some of the Just For Men hair coloring for facial hair.

New Cluster Certification Study Guide

The second edition of the
MySQL 5.1 Cluster Study Guide is now available through Vervante books. Those of you who have patiently emailing me to ask when you can order your copy should should get their order in ASAP.

Cluster Study Guide

A new edition of the MySQL 5.1 Cluster Certification Study Guide is due out any day now. As soon as I get the new on the availability, you will see it here. It will be bigger, better, and all the marking adjectives you would ever want.

But the original, first printing is sold out.

Example MySQL Certification Exam Questions

Over the weekend I received a few emails asking for sample questions for the four MySQL Certification exams. There is a CDROM that comes with the MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide that covers the Developer and DBA Questions. The MySQL 5.1 Cluster Certification Study Guide (next edition due any day) has questions at the end of every chapter.

And there are questions that are just slightly modified from each ofthe four exams at http://www.mysql.com/certification/selftest/core/index.php

CLI Lives!

I got a fair amount of response from my last blogging about including the MySQL Administrator tool as a useful utility in a hands on exam for DBAs. In general I do not like GUIs and prefer the old fashion way. The first thing I did after getting my Mac laptop was open up a terminal to get to the command line interpreter. But I never expected so many to be in favor of forgoing the Administrator tool and sticking with the CLI.

You can read the comments for yourself. I found myself agreeing with all of them. I did receive some private emails that generally distilled to the DBA exam being test of DBA skills and not how well one can manage the latest version of an add-on product.

One of the reasons I used to tell novices to use the vi editor was that it was a common denominator and would be there at three in the morning after your data center had go to heck and you needed to get your servers back on line.

And so, you will get to do the next generation of exams on the CLI.