MySQL 5.6 Developer Certification Beta Exam Review

Last friday, I did the MySQL 5.6 Developer Certification Beta Exam. This is the exam that Oracle is launching because of the new MySQL 5.6 Developer certification that will replace the old MySQL 5.0 certification in 2014. I don’t know if I’m certified yet because in beta, all candidate exams have to be reviewed in order to analyse how difficult it was, what questions were not appropriated, typos, etc.) before going live.

Live in Q2-2014

With the new certification that will be officially released in Q2 – 2014, developers just need to past one exam (previous certification was two exams). As other certifications, before going live passes through a process of beta.

Beta exam cheaper but harder

During beta time, exam is really cheap (39$ regardless 200$) but candidates face 135 questions (as I did) during 180 minutes. A bit exhausting and boring at the end.

Questions

Related to the questions, it looks like Oracle wants to check quite practical expertise, 80% os questions where about queries and their results, the rest, about engines, meta information, performance, locks and code snippets for PHP, Java and .NET.

How to be prepared

I think the best material is the reference: well explained, all the details are there but lacking examples that you should complement with the old MySQL Certification Guide book. I was quite surprised about how few professional content about MySQL is in Internet apart of the Oracle one (IMHO, too expensive).

Recommendations

Practice, just practice. Play with sort, limit, union, alias, subqueries, indexes, etc. Study a lot but don’t think about the exam if you are not confortable with high intensive daily mysql usage. Just my opinion.

• certification
• mysql
• mysql 5.6 certification
• oracle