SQL Training

petes2008

Can anyone tell me the most valued SQL certification available and can anyone recommend any good fulltime training courses?

Tom Dunne

Define "most valued".

And are you talking about the SQL language or MS SQL Server?

Seth Brundle

fulltime courses?
How long are you expecting to be training for?

petes2008

Hi,
By most valued I mean the certification that is most sought after and in demand. By SQL I mean SQL Server.

petes2008

I have been allocated two weeks off by my employees to attend a fulltime course.

Tom Dunne

Have a read of this thread.

You need to be clear on what you want to achieve. This will partly depend on your experience and prior knowledge.

petes2008

Okay, thanks Tom. I am currently suporting an infrastructure that relies heavily on some databases running on MS SQL Server 2005. I am looking to get trained to a level where I can write queries, get to know the workings of MS SQL and also learn about things like replication, logging and performance tuning. Its been suggested the MSDBA route maybe the way to go but maybe this requires some SQL experience which I have only a small amount of at present?? Can you recommend a certification path from your experience? Would you know the best place to undertake a two week full-time course on this kind of thing?

Tom Dunne

petes2008 wrote: »

Can you recommend a certification path from your experience?

Why yes, I can. Ditch MS SQL and go with a real database.

Just kidding. I couldn't really as my areas of expertise is Oracle. Ginger will hopefully be along soon and is quite knowledgeable in this area, so should be able to give you some advice.

petes2008 wrote: »

Would you know the best place to undertake a two week full-time course on this kind of thing?

MS SQL courses, from my limited exposure to them, are easy enough to come by in the cities. Where are you located?

petes2008

Im located in Dublin. I am looking to underatake a course where there is tutor present who is an expert in the field and will give classes himself as opposed to some training centres where you are left in a room with an computer based tutorial. Thanks for your help on this.

Battlejuice

think i'm in the same boat as you Petes2008 and thinking of going for the Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist cert covering Installation and Maintenance, Database Development and Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance.
Pretty new to all this but, like yourself, the company relies a lot on SQL so hoping to find a decent course to give me a good understanding.

petes2008

I think you're right Battlejuice. All signs are pointing towards the MCTS for me at this stage. There seems to be three different MCTS paths to choose from:

1. Implementation and Maintenance
2. Database Development
3. Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance

Can anyone recommed the best option to take here? Can anyone recommend a good training centre to undertake a course like this?

Cheers.

Ginger

Afternoon.

Right firstly.. training courses for MS SQL can be a bit light in real world work. You are nearly better off setting up your own virtualised environment and getting some hands on experience before getting some additional directed training.

The MCTS routes are different depending on whether you are using MSSQL 2005 or 2008.

On 2005 there is one MCTS covering a mix of admin and development and 1 MCTS for BI. On 2008 there is one for each discipline.

In a nutshell the order of most valued would be

MCTS BI
MCTS Admin
MCTS Developer

Personally I think there is more scope for the BI and adminitsration ones rather than the developer one which tends to be an additional MCTS for those doing .NET development.

If you decide to go down the BI route, you generally move out of the administration side of things and get into data analytics, cubes, OLAP and excel. The MCITP (which is the next step up from MCTS) deals with some infrastructure and administration specifically for BI solutions but for most people its only a small scratch on the surface.

The MCTS SQL 2008 admin cert will cover the stuff you are looking at, right now. Its all about mirroring, disaster recovery, transaction log shipping, replication and security. If this is your thing, then thats the cert. Again I would suggest building your own lab and working through the stuff on TechNet to get this going.

You can see from my blog, I did a couple of posts on 70-433 which is the database developer MCTS for 2008. Its all about T-SQL on SQL 2008 and doesnt really deal with any setting up etc.

petes2008

Thanks for the info Ginger, its been a great help. I think the best choice for me is the MCTS Admin certificate since it seems most tailored to what I want to achieve in work. I've been allocated some funds and time off to get certified so I may as well attend a fulltime course seeing as its been made available. Can you or anyone else recommend the most reputable training centre in Dublin that offers this kind of training?
Thanks again.

Ginger

Well being very honest, I have never actually taken an SQL course, so I cant really advise you on one.