MySQL Certification – Filling gaps in my knowledge

Like many others, I’ll be taking the MySQL 5.6 certification exam at the end of this month. As Todd blogged, the quick reference pages are available online for the Developer Exam and the DBA Exam. I’ve long considered myself more of a DBA, so I know the the developer exam that I need to study up on these topics:

But there are also a few DBA topics I could benefit from a refresh on:

I’ll be writing more on my experiences studying these topics (and which manual pages helped me out) in the coming days.

Published by

morgo

I joined MySQL AB in 2006, left, and am now back at Oracle working on the MySQL team. I’ve also worked at Percona and InPowered.

  • Federico Razzoli

    Probably what I’m going to write is just caused by my lack of experience – I never had an Oracle certification, or any other certification. However, I find very hard to guess the details level of the exam questions. The docs contains lots and lots of info about the listed topics, so when should we stop stop studying more details?
    A set of fake questions would help – I mean, questions that we will not find in the exam, but has the same details level/difficulty as real exam questions.
    As an alternative, more posts from you could help too : )

    • Hi Federico, my colleague Todd has written some fake questions. Here is a link: http://mysqlblog.fivefarmers.com/2013/10/17/exam-cram-mysql-architecture-for-developers-section-1/

      To go into a bit more detail on your question though: one of the aspects of making this a beta exam, is we don’t actually know exactly how hard it is. The pass/fail marks are set after the beta period closes, and some questions will surely be eliminated as too easy, too difficult, misleading, etc.

      The way I like to look at it, is that it’s $50 during this period. What have you got to lose?

  • Abdel-Mawla Gharieb

    Hello Morgan,

    Thanks for your posting and sharing your thoughts.
    I’m planning to attend the two exams as well by the end of the next month, if you can share your exam experience after attending, it would be nice.

    Thanks,

    • Certainly. I sat the dev exam yesterday, and will sit the DBA today.

      Quick thoughts on dev:

      – It did take me about the full amount of time (3 hours) to make sure I answered all the questions and reviewed them.

      – It does ask a lot of MySQL behaviour questions. Todd’s sample questions were helpful: http://mysqlblog.fivefarmers.com/

      • Abdel-Mawla Gharieb

        Thanks Morgan, I hope you did very well in the DBA exam.

  • Siyon Inc

    Morgan, can we use old mysql 5.0 study guide to study for this test ?

    • I would not recommend it. There are a large number of questions specifically target at 5.6 feature knowledge.

      • Siyon Inc

        thanks for the reply. what about the mysql 5th edition developer’s library which claims to cover mysql 5.5 and 5.6 ? if there are no sources then i’m in big trouble ):