MySQL Certification Study Guide

By Mike Kruckenberg, Tufts University

The MySQL Certification Study Guide is an excellent source of information as well as pre-exam preparation materials. The clearly written text and thorough exercises provide a way to learn development for MySQL and MySQL administration completely.

The authors of this book are well-qualified, Paul and Stefan both work on the MySQL AB documentation team, and Carsten is the Certification Manager for MySQL AB. Paul is consistently one of the most frequent posters to the MySQL users mailing list, fielding question after question from users. You couldn't ask for more qualified people to write this guide.

The book is broken into two main sections, Core and Professional. The Core section is 9 chapters focusing on knowledge needed to be a developer using MySQL. The 7 chapters in the Professional section delve into areas of administration, optimization, replication etc.

The text of each chapter provides just the right level of information to enable smart development or administration, providing details about how and why the particular statement or setting is used, and some details about caveats. Some of the most concise and clear explanations of general database and MySQL-specific knowledge I've ever seen are in this text. Even after having used MySQL (and a few other DBMS) for many years I found myself with a clearer understanding of certain SQL statements and administrative functions. The percentage of questions on the exam from each chapter is specified at the beginning, and throughout each chapter periodic notes are made about principles that are not covered in detail because they aren't part of the exam.

At the end of each chapter is a rigorous set of exercises that both test your memory on the details of SQL and MySQL as well as give you a chance to apply principles explained in the chapter. These range from true/false questions to problems with a setup of table definitions and/or data sets asking for syntax to create a solution to an issue. At first I read the book on the train, but found that as I finished a chapter and got into the exercises that I wanted a piece of paper to sketch the problem and formulate an answer.

I ended up doing the exercises at my desk, digging into the questions and learning the material better than I ever could by perusing as I had with previous books and the online docs. The exercises are invaluable in preparing for either the Core or Professional exam, providing a way to enforce the learning that happens while reading.

The appendix has a reference section which contains short descriptions for SQL commands, MySQL functions, column types and server system variables. It is helpful to have the summary to use for review, except in the case of the variables section, where there's a statement that the exam might include variables not listed in the section. The one flaw I saw in the book, why have the section if it's not going to include all the variables. The appendix also contains a certification guide which details specific details about taking the exam (how to register, how the exam proceeds, etc).

In conclusion . . . I've read many a tech book over the past few years and have spent even more time in online docs, this text is right up there with some of my favorites. If you are looking to get certified or just want to deepen your understanding of SQL and MySQL this text goes beyond the mark.

About the Author

Mike Kruckenberg is a Senior Programmer at Tufts University, working on the Apache/Perl/MySQL driven Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK), a content repository for faculty and students. He has been working with web technologies since 1994, using MySQL as the database of choice since 1998.

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