MySQL Training UK: MySQL Courses at GBdirect

This section of our training site provides details of the MySQL training courses that we deliver in the UK. At present, this section consists mostly of the MySQL course outlines that you can see links for in the indented menu to the left (i.e. below the bit of black text saying ‘MySQL training courses’, to indicate the current page).

In the long run we hope to fill out our MySQL training pages with details about the capabilities of the MySQL database, about MySQL migration issues, and about MySQL certification. This information will include training roadmaps for skills development in MySQL and related open source technologies like PHP.

In the meantime, we’d like to address some questions that are likely interest prospective MySQL trainees:

1. Why should I acquire skills in MySQL, rather than Oracle, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, etc?
2. What distinguishes a GBdirect MySQL training course from MySQL courses offered by other training companies?
3. Which MySQL training course best suits to my requirement?

Why MySQL Training?

When our consultants are asked to recommend an RDBMS, their stock response is to ask: “What do you want the database to do?”, “What skills have you already got?” “What database systems have you already committed resources and data to?”

We are most likely to recommend an investment in MySQL training, if you are resourcing a new project, especially one with a web focus, because supporting database-driven websites is one of the things that MySQL does best. MySQL is probably the world’s most popular website backend (on all major operating systems, Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac, etc), because it is stunningly fast at reading data, i.e. the thing that data-driven websites do most of the time. The price isn’t bad either!

MySQL is also a pretty good choice for generic database applications in small and medium sized business (SME/SMB) environments, providing power and reliability beyond the likes of MS Access, and price/performance advantages over unecessarily heavy duty RDBMSes like Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server.

MySQL is not currently the best choice for massively complex data centre operations in very large enterprises (e.g. processing hundreds of millions of records in highly interdependent systems), but it is rapidly acquiring many of the features which have previously excluded it from this domain (e.g. transactions, sub-selects, triggers, etc). Although most of these features appear in the latest MySQL development releases, we are not yet confident enough of their maturity to recommend them for the largest business-critical applications.

Why GBdirect MySQL Training?

Well, unlike most of the other training companies in this field, we and our clients have been running serious business operations on MySQL since the mid-1990s. Web sites and ecommerce applications that we’ve built using MySQL have done millions of pounds worth of business and have handled millions of page impressions per day, without drawing breath.

Like any database, MySQL has its quirks, but having worked with it over so many years and so many increasingly capable versions, we like to think that our MySQL trainers have more experience than most in coaxing it into doing the right thing.

In all the years that our consultants have been deploying and integrating MYSQL applications, they have also been developing and teaching the MySQL courses that we offer here, i.e. our MySQL training has been tried and tested in battle by real teachers, real students and real users.

Finally, we practice what we preach when it comes to open standards compliance and cross-platform portability. GBdirect MySQL training courses are taught pretty-much identically on Windows, Linux or Unix and are designed for maximum practical compliance with the ANSI/ISO SQL standards (SQL-92 and SQL-99). Indeed, the differences between MySQL on Windows and Linux is so miniscule that we can have delegates using both operating systems in the same classroom. Where MySQL differs significantly from the SQL standard or other variants of SQL, our MySQL training courses try to flag up the major problems and workarounds.

MySQL public courses schedule