MySQL Certification

When I told my employer that I would like the MySQL Certification Exam, he was quite okay with it and suggested to pay for the book and the exam fees. I looked forward to learning about the lesser used MySQL features: triggers, stored procedures, prepared statements and views. These are not very often used in web development, at least not to my knowledge.

There are three certifications available from MySQL: Developer, Database Administrator and Cluster Administrator. I took the Certified Developer Exam. Each exam is divided into two smaller tests. The first test was very simple, dealing with the basic MySQL features: architecture, connectors, data types, tables, SQL expressions, and basic data manipluations. The most interesting part was the chapter about data types. You usually don’t pay much attention to this but knowing how much storage is required for each data type and knowing the finer details about casting and character sets has proven to be quite handy.

The second test was a bit harder, I was not yet famillair with the possibilities of views, triggers, stores procedures and prepared statements. The parts about joins and subqueries were – again – relatively easy, but I did learn some details about subqueries.

I passed both tests with good grades, but I am not completely satistied. The more advanced features such as stored procedures and triggers are difficult to use in the web applications that I usually work on. Prepared statements looked quite interesting, but unfortunately MySQL has a bug which makes it impossible to use the query cache when using prepared statements. Foreign key constraits and transactions do look interesting, but they’re not dealt with in the Developer Certification program, you have to take the Database Administrator Exam for that. Fortunately, my employer will let me take this exam too.

All in all I am not sure if I can recommend the MySQL Certified Developer Program. If you have a lot of experience in MySQL and work in web development, you might learn a few new things that you can actually use. If you’re relatively new to MySQL, it might be worth it.