It’s been a busy month so far and with Easter now upon us the year is showing no sign of deceleration.

I spent the last few weeks working hard to recover from my initial attempt at passing the Zend Certified Engineer exam. Having used PHP and other languages for several years I grabbed a copy of the Php|architect’s Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide, bought a few online practice tests from Zend and spent a few days scoring Excellent before heading down to the test centre confident I would be leaving with a Pass.
Forty five minutes into the exam I was racing through the questions thinking I had it in the bag only to be presented with a Fail upon clicking the End button…..Bummer

The score report gave no real indication of how close I came to passing, so wondering where I went wrong I scoured the net for any information that could help me prepare for my next attempt (which you get a 10% discount on if you ask Zend nicely). During my search I found the Zend Certification Forum, however it was broken and I had to ask for it to be fixed (which took a couple of days) before I could read others views on the exam. The Zend forum and site I have to say are not good adverts for PHP. The site often takes ages to load (is this down to PHP? people will think) and the forum feels pre web 2.0.

After a few hours of searching I finally found this PDF, the PHP 5 course material that outlines everything you need to focus on for the exam and provides enough examples to to get your head around the “gotchas” that are hidden in many of the questions. Second time round I passed, although many questions were similar to my first attempt and I answered them no different, I can only put my initial fail down to the PHP “gotchas” like:

What is the output of echo 09;

Post certification I had to ask for the Yellow Pages entry to be added (a common problem it seems), and after finally getting the page updated it seems to have reverted to its former state…..If only it was written in Java I keep thinking to myself.
Don’t get me wrong I am a big fan of PHP but feel its place is within the presentation layer (this site is written using PHP). When it comes down to middle tier processing I am yet to be convinced…

Speaking of Java, I decided that along with moving house this Easter (I need a server room ), I would open my mind to the world of software that is Oracle. The Oracle Database is hardly Open Source, however Oracle as a company do support the Open Source Community and to be honest I’m a knowledge junkie and need something fresh to feed my mind with (fear not MySQL).
Besides at the end of the day everything I learn from taking apart Oracle can be directly applied to the Open Source world, that is if it has not been applied already.

You may have noticed the Easter Bunny pic included with this post and if you are into Open Source you would have recognised him as Big Buck Bunny the star of the upcoming open movie Peach. That’s right there are only a few more weeks to the release of the movie and you can now take a look at the trailer before downloading your copy of Blender and having a go yourself - I can’t wait!

I know it’s a little late, but as this is my first post of 2008 I wanted to start on a high!

After receiving my copy of the MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBA book at Christmas, I spent an hour or so each day with my head engrossed in MySQL Cluster technology, so much so that my goal of reading every Perl book I own (cover to cover) has been somewhat put on hold…

The book was much smaller than I expected, in both physical size and pages (266) which was not a bad thing as I could carry it around if needed, and each chapter could be read within 15-20 minutes, just about right for my attention span

I booked the exam a couple of weeks ago thinking I might need some incentive to fully digest MySQL Cluster details. I need not have worried, the book provides a great introduction to MySQL Cluster in easy-to-read chapters bringing you up to speed in no time, much more entertaining than the reference manual!

The exam itself consisted of 70 questions and on this occasion ended with a prompt asking to print to a file……argghhh……I suddenly got worried that the exam had crashed and that all my answers were lost?!, after all you normally get an instant result on screen and a printed record. I knew I should have used my regular testing centre Print -> File -> USB Stick -> another PC -> Adobe Distiller -> Print and I finally got the result - Passed - Phew!.

So the holidays are over and I have more time to focus on the fun stuff, like upgrading this site to the latest version of WordPress or adding GnuPG based encryption to AuthStor. If history is anything to go by the next few months are bound to see a spate of version bumps. I am personally looking forward to FreeBSD 7.0!

You never know, I might even find time to finish reading those Perl books before Perl 6 is complete

It’s been a few weeks since I last posted here or even found time to develop any of the ideas that continually spring to mind. In fact this is the first weekend in several where my head is not stuck in a book about Perl, Solaris or UML. Why you may ask? (or not).

Well after finally getting round to taking the Solaris Network Administrator exam, I thought it only right that I complete the set and get to know Solaris Security a bit better by taking the SCSECA.

After achieving the SCSECA, I was just about getting ready to start writing code again when I stumbled upon the UML Certification Program.
I have been a fan of UML for a long time but never found a tool that I felt comfortable using, or more to the point a tool worth the money!. That was until on the very same day I decided to trial Visual Paradigm, could this be the UML tool I have been seeking?

Visual Paradigm for UML is not overly expensive (many price levels to cater for all requirements), it runs on Windows / Linux / OSX and it’s easy to use - I like it!.

Armed with the UML tool I have been looking for and a copy of the UML 2 Certification Guide I spent another week brushing up on my UML skills while studying for the first of 3 exams offered by the OMG, UML Certified Professional - Fundamental.
I passed the exam last week and learned a lot more UML along the way!
So finally, with all that studying out of the way I can finally get back to the fun stuff - Code.

But where does Perl fall into this jacked-in period? Well I have been waiting for Perl 6 for a long time now and plan to use Catalyst as the platform for BinaryStor and AuthStor. So what better way to get up to speed than a Perl readathon of as many Perl books as I can get my hands on. From Learning to Mastering and eventually Best Practices all over again, you never know I might just finish reading before the release of Perl 6.

As for the Code I cannot make my mind up as to where to focus my energy and so opted for a working NetUnit (I did think of porting it to Perl ). It’s far from complete of course and suffers from the constraint of root privileges, but I’m hoping a future Java release will fix that….

It’s been at least a month since I last installed Solaris and after receiving several e-mails with details on the next OpenSolaris build (every other week) I just couldn’t resist the urge to take it for a test drive.

The installation has not changed much (I just missed build 70 - it’s downloading as I type) and this time around I found myself running the text based install from within the GUI, not a bad thing as I prefer the text install and always forget to select that option at boot.
An hour or so later and I now have a Solaris box to play with, handy as I am looking at using Java for one of my projects, and as I have mentioned before, Java runs best on Solaris!.

Not one to stand still for longer than a minute, I began focusing my attentions on JavaEE 5. Once again I found myself choosing between GlassFish and Apache Geronimo, not an easy task. I was very impressed with Geronimo the last time I fired it up, but I have been hearing a lot of good things about GlassFish recently and the v2 release can not be far off.

GlassFish felt much quicker this time around and the admin interface is looking very “Enterprise Like”, very nice!. A quick deploy of Lucene and everything worked as expected, now for the hard part, design…

As for preempting change, well who could have missed the IBM/Solaris announcement last week. Solaris is finally getting the recognition it deserves and with IBM on board and Dell not far behind, we may now start to see the Small/Medium Business taking advantage of the Enterprise capabilities and World-Record performance.

With this information to hand I spent the weekend upgrading my Solaris Administrator Cert to include Sun Certified Network Administrator for Solaris 10. You need a good understanding of the IP stack to take this test, and in doing so you learn a lot about the differences between Solaris and other Unix variants.

If your still not convinced, try it for yourself, download your copy of Solaris 10 here, it’s free!.

After taking a well earned break from studying, I dusted off my copy of the MySQL Certification Guide and lost my head again for a good 4 days or so.

My goal this time was to achieve Certified MySQL 5.0 Developer through upgrading my Core certification - sounds easy right?.

That’s what I though. I totally underestimated this exam, thinking it was just an upgrade and that the questions would be straightforward, after all there are only 60 questions in this exam compared to the 70 per exam for DBA!.

Having spent less time this year writing code, the first thing I noticed about this exam was that I had to apply hands on knowledge to the questions, I had to think through how I would run certain queries and understand the expressions that were available, something I have not had to do recently. This led to frustration when testing my knowledge against the sample questions in the book, as I actually had to understand the theory behind the questions. Not easy when you spend more time as a DBA maintaining the server than using it!.

Studying for the exam gave me an understanding of features I had not yet implemented, features like Stored Routines, Triggers and Views. I now understand the benefits these features provide and will factor them into any future code I write. If like me you have not taken the time to get to grips with these additions, I suggest you spend a few minutes research. I now think of Stored Routines in terms of Library’s that can be shared between applications - a great way to simplify client side coding!.

So what makes this a certification worth having? Well there are very little resources available for this exam, no practice tests that I could see, no cheat sheets. You need to work with MySQL if you really want to pass this exam, and in doing so you learn a lot more than you would just reading material, that alone makes this a worthwhile cert!.

The MySQL Certification Guide is fantastic and covers all the topics required to pass the exam, the sample questions get you involved and you get to explore the world through SQL!. (you know what I mean)
If you are considering any of the MySQL Certifications you definitely need this book!.

So only one exam left (yes I passed), the CMCDBA (actually 2 if you count the CMA). I think I will wait until the MySQL 5.1 Cluster Certification Guide is released before I start down that path!…

After having a week to recover from the first exam I finally got around to taking the second one….and passed!!

Part II of the MySQL DBA Certification focused a lot more on the day to day running of the server, compared to Part I which was very much installation / configuration based.

Studying for the exam was a little difficult as I also had to work this week (as opposed to being on holiday!), but the skills you gain can be directly applied to everyday management of MySQL, and can be very rewarding especially if you focus on optimisation.

So what next you ask? Well after getting this far I thought it only fair that I give something back to the MySQL Community in the form of a MoinMoin Macro - mmMySQL.

mmMySQL provides a quick way to view MySQL Status and Config directly from your Wiki pages. If like me you manage several MySQL servers and want a quick way to view your server Status or Config, just drop this macro into your MoinMoin Macro folder and add it to a page….easy huh!.

As for where we go from here with mmMySQL……who knows?

While checking out the new features due for MySQL 6.0 (Falcon) the other day, I happened to browse my way past the Certification pages to see if anything had changed - am I glad I did!

It was during my browsing that I noticed the Important Information that detailed a typsetting error with the voucher expiry date found in the MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide……..the same guide that had been sat on my lounge floor for the last few months…..

Quickly flipping through the pages I found the voucher that offered 25% off your exam and then went straight to the site to check the actual expiration date - 30 June 2007. Well that gave me about 5 days to take advantage of the voucher and seeing as I was making the most of the few days holiday I had left from last year I decided to cash in.

I went for the DBA certification rather than upgrade my Core to a Developer, mainly as I tend to look after MySQL installations more than develop against them at the moment, but also as I wanted to start afresh and go back to basics before upgrading.

The exam definately tests your knowledge of MySQL and if it was not for having several installations to manage, and such a great book (MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide), I don’t think I would have passed. I was amazed at how much I remembered from the Core exam, I took that one over a year ago!.

So after 3 days of having my head in a book I passed the DBA part 1 exam (just), that leaves part 2 (maybe in a few weeks)….