Training and certification

I realise that these have been discuuseed before, but a couple of things
have happened that caused me to bring this up again, and to raise some
questions.

A couple of nights ago, a seminar was presented in Perth, Western
Australia, by an institution offering IT masters degrees. One of the
masters degrees, was a Master of Systems Development (MSD). Their
masters degrees incorporated industry certification. The MSD
incorporated the Microsoft MCAD and MCSD, and related to .NET systems
development. The institution is also investigating possibly offering a
similar masters degree, relating specifically to, or emphasising,
databases. After the presentation, I asked the presenter about the
possibility of incorporating open source, rather than proprietary system
development, with open source industry certification. Unfortunately, the
only open source industry certification that was relevant, that I could
cite, was the MySQL certification set, along with LPI and RHCE
certification, with no apparent industry certification for PostgreSQL.
The presenter said that the institution was considering Oracle as a
possibility in the future, Oracle having industry certification.

Thus, recognised, international, industry certification of
open source application systems development, either involving PostgreSQL
as a database backend by itself, or, involving PostgreSQL as a factor
(eg, open source database applications development involving either
PostgreSQL or MySQL as separate options, or, competency with both),
could be useful, apart from having the internationally recognised
industry certification in its own right, encouraging acceptance of open
source software development in such qualifications as these masters
degrees with their incorporated recognised international industry
certification.

In trying to find the organisation that I had understood to be the main
one for providing PostgreSQL certification (I had understood that it was
PostgreSQL.com, or something like that, or, possibly pgsql.com), and,
being unable to find any details of any competency-based certification
at these sites, I did a bit of searching, and I found a postgresql.org
web page at http://www.postgresql.org/survey.php?View=1&SurveyID=22 ,
which gave the results of a survey, with the question "Should we create
a standard worldwide PostgreSQL training course?", with 79.691% of the
votes, being votes for the yes side - and of that percentage, 50.386
"strongly yes". The survey is not dated, so I do not know how long ago
it was held. However, it appears to have indicated support for "a
standard worldwide PostgreSQL training course".

On the web page, whils other survey questions are listed, no further
reference is made to the result of the survey, for example, "The
PostgreSQL guru's are <investigating the possibility of> developing a
standard worldwide PostgreSQL traing course, in response to the survey
results".

So, I ask, given the result of the poll, however old it is, is any
action being taken, to develop "a standard worldwide PostgreSQL training
course", or set of such courses (eg, core, DBA, developer,
PHP|Perl/PostgreSQL web developer, etc)?

I also found a web page at
http://advocacy.postgresql.org/advantages/?lang=en , in which the text
was included;
"our training programs are generally regarded as being more
cost-effective, manageable, and practical in the real world than that
of the leading proprietary database vendors.".

To what training programs, does this refer? Are they standardised, or,
does this refer to separate, independent, autonomous, individual
training programs that are not standardised?

Also, in my searching, I did manage to find a certification at
http://www.postgresql.at/certification.html , which also has a link to
training provided by that company. From the web site, it appears that
the training/certtification provided by that company, is of ten days
duration, assumedly of 8 hours per day, thence 80 hours, the equivalent
of about 6 hours per week over a 13 week period, plus two hours, thence,
the equivalent of a single semester, university unit.

That appeared to be the only detailed training/certification course that
I could find in PostgreSQL.

From the web page at http://techdocs.postgresql.org/companies.php , that
company appears to be a small company in Austria, and the company and
certification appear to be recognised by PostgreSQL.org .

Is that the only PostgreSQL certification that is recognised? Is it
recognised internationally?

Thank you in anticipation, for answers to all of these questions.

--
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
Chapter 28 of
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
A Trilogy In Four Parts",
written by Douglas Adams,
published by Pan Books, 1992
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