Got listed on the Zend yellow pages over the weekend. Even got a comment from a Zend employee on my last blog post about PHP5 certification. Hope i wasn’t too harsh on them guys 
As you all know Sun Microsystems, Inc. is now behind MySQL. What you may not know is that it has a team of marketing droids pushing solaris and enterprise mysql server like hell. Seriously if you haven’t heard a lot about dtrace, open solaris and ZFS lately you must have been living in a cave ;) I personally viewed a few webinars on mysql.com and got personal emails from Sun promoting mysql enterprise servers. Have you looked at a MySQL.com downloads page recently? I hope google ads are raining money on them. Not that i’m jealous no. But i personally think that a company must have an image to care about. And now even the downloads page looks like a shopping center. Then there you can read about all these great people leaving MySQL and joining other development groups or companies. Even Drizzle itself has a reason why it was started. If MySQL was so great there would have never been no Drizzle. The community doesn’t seem too happy about MySQL 5.1 release aswell.
Even though it seems that MySQL is not having the best time of it’s life i believe it will be fine. And so i have decided to take both MySQL developer and MySQL DBA exams. I have been working with MySQL for more than 5 years and i still don’t feel that i know it really well. Started reading the MySQL 5.0 certification study guide and hope to take the exams in few months. Probably won’t make it by that time but still nice to believe in yourself 
. It will be interesting to compare the Zend and MySQL certification programs. While reading the book it was odd to find out that MySQL Query Browser was the third chapter of the book. And you must be able to know your way around the tool to take the developer exam. Not to mention you must read it’s manual. I have never used that tool and phpmyadmin has allways sufficed my needs as a web applications developer. Though i agree it must be a really useful tool for non web applications developers atleast. The study guide book comes with a CD that has training exercises in it. And imagine my dissapointment when i didn’t find a mock exam application to test my knowledge but instead a PDF e-book with questions from every chapter. Not sure how helpful it’s going to be. Even though the guide states that it is designed to make you think instead of memorize the material i think they could have put more effort to allow people test themselves better. Not much you can think of Query Browser tool if you don’t know it. It’s not that hard to make a web application with a ton of questions in it. Ofcourse there’s pirating and stuff but you just have to deal with it to provide a better service.
I will be writing more about MySQL certification experiences in the future. That’s it for now.
