G’day,

There’s a lot of mixed opinions around about certifications.

Are they worth while, do they mean anything, do employers value them and the like.

I’m personally in the “certifications are definatly” worth while camp. For a few reasons,

• Certifications test my knowledge to a certain standard and give me a “knowledge baseline”
• When studying for exams I’ll go though area’s of SQL SERVER that I wouldn’t normally in my day to day activities eg Service broker.
• I think the combination of experience and certifications sit well together.

I completed my SQL SERVER 2000 MCDBA back in 2004, but I didn’t progess it when SQL SERVER 2005 came along. My experience of SQL 2005 was that a lot of companies were happy with 2000 and simply did not see a benefit of upgrading. By the time that a decision was made to upgrade, SQL SERVER 2008 was just around the corner and the majority of people simply waited and went straight to 2008.

I took the decision to simply start from scratch again and work towards the SQL SERVER 2008 qualifications – and I’m glad I did. I haven’t completed all of the exams yet, but that has more to do with all of the Prometric centres being closed in the citty where I live, Christchurch, after the recent earthquake here!

However, I’m going to make sure that I keep these current, especially with Denali, just around the corner – I think that I’ll be wanting to upgrade as soon as possible.

The reason that I’m telling you all this is that Microsoft are currently running a survey about these new exams, you can find it here

I learned a few things while filling the survey in – like some of the new features that are coming along.

There are three different tracks to the survey, dev / dba / bi, and you can fill as many tracks a you like in. The suvey took about 10 minutes and I think it was worthwhile.

Go fill it in if you have time – here’s the link again, http://microsoftlearning.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_d0aiKaCWQ6W0wqE

have a nice day,

cheers

Martin.