N. Texas Users Group meeting

The next meeting of the North Texas MySQL Users Group is Monday February 1st. There will be a give away of soon to be collectible Sun memorabilia! The presentation is An Introduction to MySQL: 99 Things You Probably Did Not Know and we will talk about the future of the group in 2010 (some exiting opportunities).

Monday February 1st, 7:00 PM, Suite 700,Sun Offices 16000 Dallas Tollway, Dallas, Texas

MySQL Certification Exam Price Raised

Sun has made changes in the certification procedures for all their exams including the MySQL exams. Exam vouchers are no longer offered through local Sun Sales Offices but exams can be purchased directly from Prometric. The price has been raised to $300 per exam.

The exam codes are:
Sun 310-810 Sun Certified MySQL DBA 5.0 part I
Sun 310-811 Sun Certified MySQL DBA 5.0 part II
Sun 310-812 Sun Certified MySQL Developer 5.0 part I
Sun 310-813 Sun Certified MySQL Developer 5.0 part II
Sun 310-814 Sun Certified MySQL Associate
Sun 310-815 Sun Certified MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBA

The new prices went into effect January 19th.

Publishing your MySQL Certs from the Sun Certification system

I received a question from my last entry on how to let others see your MySQL Certifications. In the past, the MySQL site had a list of those with the various certifications. Sun's certification system is different.

1. Go to the Sun Certification Database


2. Enter your ID and password. The format for the ID is usually SUNnnnnnnn but it may be different. There is a First Time Users link and a link to get your ID and password (you do remember the email you used when you took that MySQL, don't you?). And if you get stuck, contact Certificiation@SUN.Com


3. On the left hand menu, under Certifications will be a link for Publish Credentials.


4. Here you provide an email address for where you want your certifications sent. You can also select which certification you want to share.


5. You will get a chance to preview of what will be sent. The Void -- Sample Only Water mark will not be on the sent message.

So what will the recipient receive? They will receive an email from The Sun Credential Verification System with a link and a authorization code to view your credentials.

MySQL Certs up 48% in 2009

Despite a bad economy and switching testing partners, MySQL certifications were up 48% in 2009. Most of the growth was from the new hands-on DBA 5.1 exam with the multiple choice exams gaining roughly 10 percent. The only exception was the Associates certification which actually decreased slightly.

Congratulations to all of you how earned a certification in 2009 and thank you for your support of MySQL.

Fulfillment Issues -- getting back on the right foot

MySQL Certification had a very busy 2009 with a great deal of change. Not all of the changes happened gracefully and now I am correcting problems with the fulfillment system. Regular readers will remember that MySQL Certification was integrated into the systems used by Sun Learning in mid 2009. Where things got shaky was in the processing of DBA 5.1 certificates.

Previously Ricky Ho and I oversaw data entry, database updates, and fulfillment. The deeply missed Ricky did the heavy lifting in the printing and mailing of certificates. The test data from the multiple choice exams was flowing properly into the new (for MySQL) system but not for the hands-on DBA 5.1 exam. I have been going through the certification records and manually entering the data for the 5.1 DBA certificate holders. It will take a week or so to get things caught up. Meanwhile, if you are still waiting for a certificate for your MySQL 5.1 certification, please let me know at Certification@MySQL.com.

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MySQl Certification exams will be offered at the 2010 O'Reilly MySQL Conference. More details will be posted here as they become available.

North Texas 1st meeting of the year -- Workbench & Cookies

Happy New Year! Monday night is the first meeting of the North Texas MySQL Users Group for 2010! And the topic for discussion will be MySQL Workbench.

Workbench is a tool for visual database design, schema documentation, change management, and is replacing the old MySQL GUI tools. If you have not tried the latest releases, you will be for a pleasant surprise.

NorthTexasMySQL.org meets at 7:00PM sharp at the Sun Offices, Suite 700, 16000 Dallas Tollway, Dallas TX. We welcome all who want to know more about MySQL, databases, or Open Source. Admission is free and I will bring cookies!

Monday's Meeting

Thanks to all who showed up at the North Texas MySQL Users Group Meeting on Monday night. We had two speakers, Pizza, and beer.

Benjamin Wood talked on the latest news on MySQL products and Robin Schumacher from Calpont discussed building high performance analytic databases.

And Basil won the drawing for the Amazon Kindle!


See you at the next meeting January 4th!

Books for your Holiday reading

Once again the holidays season is upon us and many of you will be looking for gifts. I would like to recommended the following.

For many years I felt the best overall MySQL book was The MySQL 5.0 Study Guide. It is still a very good book but it does not cover third party tools and is getting slightly dated. My new favorite MySQL book is MySQL Administrators Bible . It covers everything from installing and monitoring MySQL servers to tuning and scaling. This book is written in a clear, easy to read style and deserves to be on the bookshelf of any MySQL DBA. This will be one of those books that you will dog-ear pages and festoon with PostIt notes.

The next book is for those of you wanting to expand your PHP knowledge . I have been using PHP back when it was called Personal Home Page (and using it with a free database from tcx.se called MySQL) and have a habit of skimming every PHP book I see in bookstores (and databases, Linux, and a few others; My family knows this and avoid my book store trips). Particularly interesting for those in the MySQL world is the information under Workload-driven Performance Tuning. I started skimming this book and realized that there was a lot of good information inside the covers that made it worthy of purchase.

Please note that I get no kickbacks from Amazon and use their links as anyone in the world seem to have ubiquitous access to Amazon. And that I have met half the authors pairs for each book. I worked with Morgan Tocker and have met Sheeri Cabral at the last few Users Conferences. Nothing against John Coggeshall or Keith Murphy!

And lastly I recommend Fool for light riding. It is a re-telling of King Lear as written by the court fool. There is nothing in this book that will make your code run better or your server return data more efficiently but it a very funny read.

North Texas MySQL Meeting -- now with pizza!

At the next North Texas MySQL Users Group meeting we will be featuring pizza, soft drinks and beer. We will also have TWO presenters. Do if you are planning to be in Dallas on December 7th, please drop by!

Sun Microsystems will host the next Dallas MySQL User Group Meeting

When: Monday, December 7, 2009 | 6:00 to 8:00 pm

Where: Sun Microsystems, 7th Floor, 16000 Dallas Tollway, Dallas, TX

Map: http://bit.ly/ZnYoS

Are you interested in learning more about MySQL's new server release cycle and how it impacts the MySQL roadmap? Or are you looking to get the latest update on storage engines or development and administration tools? Are you investigating data warehousing and analytic solutions?

Then come join the North Texas MySQL Users Group, Benjamin Wood, Senior MySQL Systems Engineer, and Kathy Guzman, Senior Account Manager, from MySQL and Robin Schumacher, VP Products/Calpont for an interactive discussion on these MySQL hot topics and more. Pizza, beer, and soda and the opportunity to connect with other local MySQL Users provided!

Agenda

* How MySQL's New Server Release Cycle works and what's next
* Storage Engine Update
* What's New with the MySQL Query Analyzer and MySQL Workbench
* Building High Performance Analytic Databases
* Q & A / Roundtable
* Beer/Soda/Pizza

Featured Speakers:

- Benjamin Wood is a Systems Engineer with the MySQL group of Sun Microsystems. He has spent the last 12 years working with database technologies, including 8 years as a production DBA.

- Robin Schumacher, VP Products/CalPont, will lead a discussion on building high performance analytic databases.

Learn more about thse North Texas MySQL Users Group »

Register now to reserve your spot! http://www.mysql.com//news-and-events/events/dallasmeetup.php

Oracle Express Edition first steps for MySQL DBAs

I have had a few MySQL DBAs ask about how to get started learning Oracle. I will admit that it has been on my to-do list for quite a while¹. It never hurts to know more than one database system and a great deal of DBA help wanted ads mention Oracle. Someone once said that you must make sure your capabilities exceed your limitations² and recently I have been feeling limited when others have started to talk about Oracle capabilities.

So what does it take for a MySQL DBA to get their hands on their own Oracle instance? I used my Ubuntu box to go to Oracle's web site to get the free Oracle XE software.

1. Download and feed to package manager


2. Add my account to dba group


3. As root, /etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure to set passwords and ports

I pointed my web browser to http://127.0.01/apex and got the page you see in image with this blog. Now I need to find my copy of Hands-On Oracle Database 10g Express Edition for Linux.

1. I also have a stack of DB-2 and SQL Servers books that were picked up at Half Price Books to read through. I am always looking for better ways to express database concepts for MySql exams. Writing up something similar to this entry for DB2 and SQL Server is also on the list.

2. This quote has attributed to Bruce Lee and several others. And it always gota groan from my kids when I used it on them.