Friday, March 13, 2009

DBA 5.1 Exam

The first public offering of the MySQL DBA 5.1 Exam was given in Atlanta this week. After completing the week long MySQL for Database Administrators, an intrepid group agreed to be 'guinea pigs' and take the daunting exam.


The photo shows the test candidates working hard. Thanks to instructor Ian Wrigley and the students for taking up the challenge of this initial exam offering.


Previous MySQL exams are multiple choice while the DBA 5.1 exam is a performance based test. This means they had to login to a virtual server, administer several databases, and fix problems on a running MySQL instance.

Look for more updates on the DBA 5.1 exams (and others) here soon.

11 comments:

rpbouman said...

Hi!

congrats on getting this out :)

I'm sure it'll be a great success. Kudos!

Jonathan Levin said...

Sounds really good. I look forward to taking the exam here in the UK.

Anonymous said...

How do you prepare for this type of exams? Will it still be useful to read the old MySQL certification guide books?

Anonymous said...

The new exam is really great news.
The multiple choice exam was somewhat tedious, going into very small details. I appreciate the efforts made towards planning a whole new type of exam.

While there's still room for multiple-choice questions, a hands-on is, no doubt, an important notion.

Anonymous said...

Congratulations, Dave! That's great news.

Looking forward to the live exams :-)

Anonymous said...

Any idea when the exam will be offered, perhaps with a new exam study guide?

I was just getting ready to work on my 5.0 CMDBA, if it isn't far off I'd consider waiting to take the newer exam.

Thanks.

Dave Stokes said...

Q: When will the exam be available?
A: We are doing a limited roll out in March and April.

Q: How do you prepare for the exam?
A: 1) Take the MySQL for Database Administrators course, 2) Use MySQL a lot, and 3) Use MySQL a lot more.

Q: What is covered on the exam?
A: Full details will be on the MySQL.COM/certification website very soon. The exam is made up of several tasks to be performed on a MySQL Instance. Tasks include account maintenance, table recover, data partition, index optimization, MyIsam table maintenance, backups/restores, using the information schema, views, use of global variables, and much more.

Q: What are the reviews?
A: So far the candidates agree it is a tough test. They like the format over the previous multiple choice versions. But it is still a lot of hard work to finish in a two hour time limit.

Anonymous said...

Fantastic, thanks for the quick reply. I'll be waiting for this exam then.

Anonymous said...

currently in the dba 5.1 class trying to prepare for the certification exam, where can we get help to pass this, what questions should we ask the instrutor this week?
-John
broomfield training center

Dave Stokes said...

Hi Anonymous, Look up a little in my block and you will see outlines of all the tasks. Good luck!

Anonymous said...

Hi,

I was in the DBA training class in Orlando last week and took the test last Friday.

Everything was pretty good and Ian really knows his stuff.

The test material was not too bad, but I sure needed an extra hour to finish it and the test workstations had some annoying features. The PC keyboards were the cheap DELL ones which made touch typing impossible. You were always making typing mistakes and then there was a delay to see if the backspace key actually deleted the character or not.

Plus I was surprised by the various "dave" files that were sitting around.

The best adivse I can give is to study and practice the items mentioned here in Dave's Blog and to check for "dave" files before over writting anything.