Joshua D. Drake wrote:
On Mon, 4 Feb 2008 18:15:03 +0100
Hans-Juergen Schoenig <postgres@cybertec.at> wrote:
most guys on this list here have written one or the other patch in
the past so it should be fine ...
how about that?
Those same people should without incident be able to pass a
certification test.
I disagree, I think that some of those people might have quite a hard time with a certification exam. Any useful exam would *at least* cover some PostgreSQL Administrators (perhaps a separate developer exam..), and such an exam would cover a wide range of subject matter, none of which is/was related to developing or fixing source code. While we might have a developer that is great at writing a new optimization strategy, he probably won't take the time to focus on some more administrative tasks, like sequences, tablespaces, PITR - or other topics that aren't related to optimization.
Also, isn't this putting the cart before the horse? I think for a certification program to succeed we first need to develop the delivery mechanism, question bank, and administrative mechanism. Once a certification is designed and in place, we can then focus on the ancillary aspects.
I would think (from this discussion) that perhaps the first goal might be to determine the types of certifications to be offered (of there is to be more than one) and develop objectives - or at least what a "pass" of the exam should be demonstrative of. I would recommend (at least to start) a "PostgreSQL Certified Administrator" exam...
IMHO, it will be difficult to assess who is qualified to deliver certification training - if at all possible. All that can be done (at most) is to prevent courses from being listed on Postgresql.org (and even that might be difficult)...
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Chander Ganesan
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