Sun's CEC MySQL Certification

Sun's Customer Engineer Conference is now history and over forty new Certified MySQL Associates are on the street. Track 15 aka MySQL was a new session for Sun and CEC was new for George and yours truely.

George Trujillo did a wonderful job, as he always does, in getting a large room full of people with various skills up to speed with MySQL. Three sessions a day most for three days after a long Monday were tough but the folks in Track 15 hung in there. A few had Oracle or other database experience but most were new to the subject. By Thursday night they were replicating databases. Zero to replication in eight sessions. That is very impressive.

This morning was my turn and the candidates listened intently to my brief review and then tore into the test. As they finished, I made a point to try to ask each of them how they did on the test and if they thought the class has been worth the time. All agreed that the class was a great. George and I had concerns before the track started about providing a quality experience and worked hard to provide guest speakers, relevant labs, along with the outstanding materials used in MySQL Training Classes.

Now Las Vegas awaits and I am off to see more than just the conference hotel.

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.

Order and guarantees

The Certified MySQL Associate exam is the entry level exam for those new to MySQL and it covers a lot of the basics. Sometimes the basics are so basic that they are not obvious.

Suppose you have a table with dozens of columns that has been in production for a period of time and you issue the statement 'SELECT * FROM long_used_table;'. What order will the records be returned from the server?

Well, it depends. And a second try with the same statement may give you different results. The rule is that there is not a guaranteed order. If you want the data in a specific order you need to add ORDER BY, i.e. 'SELECT * FROM long_used_table ORDER BY special_index;'.

Now, on the CMA exam you are ask about this guaranteed order (or lack there of) in a very explicit fashion. In the other exams, it is not as straight forward and you have better have that internalized when reading the question. And in 'real life', this will catch you every time it can!