April 23, 2014 at 9:43 am
Gary Varga (4/23/2014)
...I can see the benefits to the community and thus to Microsoft but as what cost?
...
What's the cost? What do you see as a downside?
A little lawyer time to remove the NDA and then put up a download.
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April 23, 2014 at 9:44 am
andrew gothard (4/23/2014)
jasona.work (4/23/2014)
Gary, I think if MS open-sourced the MCM questions and scenarios, you'd fairly quickly find people using them as templates to create new questions and scenarios for newer versions of SQL.Therein lies the problem. What's to stop someone forking it with good old favourites like;
Q. "What do you do when your database is in suspect mode?"
A. "Detatch the database, delete the log file, reattatch the database. Everything will be fine"
or
A. "Run dbcc checkdb repair allow data loss. What could possibly go wrong"
all with a shiny OpenMCM <Insert animal logo here> badge. There'd need to be some form of quality control in there, and I can't see MS taking that on board
Are you saying you think that other companies would make a cert? Who cares? Why do you need quality control here?
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April 23, 2014 at 9:45 am
Gary Varga (4/23/2014)
My reading of the editorial was that the material would be good for self-learning NOT so others can resurrect the MCM certification.
Yes
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April 23, 2014 at 9:46 am
Keith Tate (4/23/2014)
Taking the questions/scenarios out of the context of the lab environment (strange environment, limited time, no internet just BOL) would detract from the experience that most of us had taking the exam. I'm not apposed to releasing the questions, but it wouldn't be the same. I think the knowledge exam would be a great set of questions that could be released to the public, but some of those questions could be reused in the current exams.
Hence the reason the MCM cert would still be valuable, but the scenarios, and maybe some of the setup of the environments, would be good learning/interviewing ideas.
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April 23, 2014 at 9:53 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (4/23/2014)
Keith Tate (4/23/2014)
Taking the questions/scenarios out of the context of the lab environment (strange environment, limited time, no internet just BOL) would detract from the experience that most of us had taking the exam. I'm not apposed to releasing the questions, but it wouldn't be the same. I think the knowledge exam would be a great set of questions that could be released to the public, but some of those questions could be reused in the current exams.Hence the reason the MCM cert would still be valuable, but the scenarios, and maybe some of the setup of the environments, would be good learning/interviewing ideas.
I agree with you that it could be a good learning opportunity and I wish more exams would include this type situation based questioning rather than just drag-and-drop or MC.
April 23, 2014 at 9:54 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (4/23/2014)
Gary Varga (4/23/2014)
...I can see the benefits to the community and thus to Microsoft but as what cost?
...
What's the cost? What do you see as a downside?
A little lawyer time to remove the NDA and then put up a download.
Having thought about it a bit more and through the discussions here then not a lot. I was originally thinking in terms of licence revenue but thinking that a bit of free training material for an older version would have any registerable level of impact on revenue was probably very naive of me.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
April 23, 2014 at 11:06 am
Microsoft should think about the alternative - which is to bury this material.
Not a really cool idea at all.
Thus make it public.
There are no in-betweens.
April 23, 2014 at 12:25 pm
Sharing information like the (now defunct) MCM labs would be very helpful to the developer community. The lab 'gotcha' examples would be invaluable, not because you might run into the exact same 'gotcha', but because working through the labs would help people in the trenches, like me, learn a method for investigating and solving those exquisitey obscure bogeys that pop up once in a while.
I'm hoping Microsoft will get better at sharing information, something that other solution providers and open source alternatives seem to do as common practices.
April 23, 2014 at 12:52 pm
I agree heartily with this editorial. I have been a DBA for 1.5 years, and would love a way to test my knowledge and see where I need improvement. I wouldn't have been able to afford taking the test anytime soon, but I would love to know how I would have fared.
April 23, 2014 at 12:59 pm
david.gugg (4/23/2014)
I have been a DBA for 1.5 years, and would love a way to test my knowledge and see where I need improvement. I wouldn't have been able to afford taking the test anytime soon, but I would love to know how I would have fared.
Then you still can't afford it. There is no "open the lab test" - the lab was a carefully constructed series of virtual machines. Microsoft would need to publish a free infrastructure for those, or distribute pre-built Hyper-V VMs with Windows and SQL Server already installed. Never gonna happen.
You have to understand that this is like a medical exam with cadavers involved. There are no free cadavers, and there are no free judges. This isn't a paper-based mark-all-that-apply exam.
April 23, 2014 at 1:15 pm
I think I understand what you mean. I was thinking of the problems more as those chess puzzles where you see the board in a certain position and it's white's move, figure out checkmate in five moves. It sounds like these situations are much more complicated to set up, not just a set of scripts to set up the schema, then go.
Off topic, I'm super pumped to hear you talk in CHI this weekend Brent!
April 23, 2014 at 1:22 pm
david.gugg (4/23/2014)
I think I understand what you mean. I was thinking of the problems more as those chess puzzles where you see the board in a certain position and it's white's move, figure out checkmate in five moves. It sounds like these situations are much more complicated to set up, not just a set of scripts to set up the schema, then go.
Yeah, exactly - for example, some of them required Windows permissions or networking to be set up in a certain way, and it's beyond what you could do in T-SQL. It'd theoretically be possible to set it up that way with PowerShell, but somebody would have to write the requirements and build those scripts out. It'd be human labor, all done by people who are no longer in the program (and many of which have even left Microsoft outright.)
As much as I'd love to help with it myself, I can't volunteer weeks of time to set that kind of thing up either.
Off topic, I'm super pumped to hear you talk in CHI this weekend Brent!
Ah, cool! See you soon! The Engine one is my favorite deck ever, tons of fun.
April 23, 2014 at 3:39 pm
Keith Tate (4/23/2014)
Taking the questions/scenarios out of the context of the lab environment (strange environment, limited time, no internet just BOL) would detract from the experience that most of us had taking the exam. I'm not apposed to releasing the questions, but it wouldn't be the same. I think the knowledge exam would be a great set of questions that could be released to the public, but some of those questions could be reused in the current exams.
I'd say that the knowledge exam is what the MCITP should be.
Wayne
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server 2008
Author - SQL Server T-SQL Recipes
April 23, 2014 at 10:04 pm
That sounds like a fantastic idea Steve, which ironically is one of the many reasons why it will probably never happen.:ermm:
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April 24, 2014 at 10:55 am
Agree, Aaron, which makes me sad.
Note that the Connect item is receiving downvotes and disagreements from MCMs. More likely nothing will happen now.
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