One of the frustrations of of working in Certification is that so little time is spent creating exam questions. There are million other things from expense reports to mandatory training that need to be take care of before delving back into things like InnoDB buffer pools or scaling Falcon databases. The good news is that new exam questions are ready for the next generation of DBA Certification and I will soon be begging the folks who helped me in the past for one last look before we shrink wrap the exams.

I attended the CEdMA Conference this week and was able to network with other certification folks. One of the items of discussion was what goes into a certification package. In tight economic times, training and certification departments need to cut costs. Many certification entities are simply sending out PDF certificates via email. Others are concerned about rising costs for shipping t-shirts, pens, wallet-sized cards, certificates, …

Four in the afternoon hit all too quickly today at the UC. 209 exams were delivered with 182 people passing. We had a few minor technical glitches but thanks to the very hard work of the Certification Team's all star players Christine Fortier and Ricky Ho (who managed to perform miracles on a routine basis while getting me trained on how UC exams really work) the three days of testing just went by in a blur.

Thanks to all who participated in the exams this year. There were a lot of very special people at the UC that we got to meet at the Magnolia room.

And special thanks to Jay Pipes who handled the UC and my tedious questions with such ease despite having no luggage for most of the conference.

Exams         Pass Fail Total
Associate 11  0 11
Cluster          7  0  7
DBA-I         57 10 67
DBA-II         46  3 49
DEV-I         34  9 43
DEV-II         27  5 …