How to become a certified DBA

I recently managed to get my certification as MySQL 5.6 DBA, and was asked to write a blog about it, because I had trouble getting the informations I needed.

You may have figured out too, that Oracle does not really supply you with information about the certification. At least, there is the MySQL documentation. It contains all the information you need.

Further, I recommend to use a virtual linux machine in combination with our tool MyEnv. This way you can simulate multiple scenarios, including replication set-ups, and if one or two servers die during your exercises, nobody gets mad at you.

When learning, make sure to have a look at the following topics:

• Query tuning
• Parameters tuning
• MySQL client tools (mysqldump, mysqladmin, ...)
• MySQL Audit Plugin
• How to secure MySQL (Especially, the correct assignment of privileges.)
• How to use the Performance and Information Schema
• Partitions
• Replication
• Backup and Recovery (Both, physical and logical variant.)

The certification takes 150 minutes and contains 100 questions. 60% of your answers have to be correct, in order to pass. If you keep a pace of one answer per minute, you will also have enough time to go over those answers you were not entirely sure at the first time.