RFC: a new try for an official community approved certification

Hi everyone,

At PgCon I mentioned a was going to create this thread so here we go:

== why do we need one?

The fact that there is no official certification is a real problem
because anyone can offer theirs and have bad answers or confuse people
about how things work. You can think that people looking for a
certification should ensure first but what if the company has a good
reputation because other certifications they have are good?

And this is an example of this happening, recently I got a
certification from a less-known company, and I found at least one
question in which there weren't any correct answers so I had to choose
the answer that was at least partially correct. And of course this
could happen to anyone.

== we have tried… and failed

Several years ago there was a project for creating a pensum that all
companies that wanted to offer the "official" certification should
comply with. But being postgres developed and improved so fast we
ended up with half the pensum and we already had to adapt part of it
because of the changes in the new version.

But of course there was the problem of not really prepared trainers, a
know a guy that was certified by a well known postgres company but he
clearly understood wrong somethings because he was teaching that you
can restore a pg_dump'ed database and then apply wals from the
original server and have PITR (doh).

== so the problems

- mantaining/updating a pensum would be difficult
- is not only a matter of covering the pensum, it should be done right
- other problems are:
-- current certifications are not neutral and cover also tools from
the company doing the certification
-- even if they have the same name, certifications cover normally
different subjects in different companies

== so, my idea

- Let's focus on creating just one certification covering only
core/contrib functionalities of postgres, and let companies have their
own certifications for third party products.
- don't try to force the pensum, just let's create a database of
validated questions and validated answers. If we focus on only one
certification (something like associate postgresql or something like
that) we can let companies decide if they want to have 1, 2 or 3
modules to prepare people to give the exam.
- Who creates the questions? And who validates them? The answer to
both questions is "trainers" from companies that want to offer the
exam. So, a trainer creates a question and another trainer (hopefully
from another company) validates the question and the answers for the
question.
Questions and answers should also be validated for postgres version
and operating system.

If a company cannot successfully prepare people for the exam they
could check if they are teaching right (I mean that they are not
saying old/not exact things).

So, having a certification made from a pool of validated
questions/answers don't only will help companies choosing trainings
but will in effect improve the quality of trainers.

There are a lot of open questions yet, like where the exams will be
taken. In the community infrastructure? in the company's?

but I guess we have still enough for start commenting.

--
Jaime Casanova
Director de Servicios Profesionales
SYSTEMGUARDS - Consultores de PostgreSQL