This last week I went to the Cassandra summit that Datastax had put on. The first day was training and certification, and the following two day was the conference itself. I had been playing with Cassandra for years, though nothing major, and certainly nothing in production yet.
The training itself was six days worth of material supplied within six hours. Datastax has training online and to a large degree, the session that day before the test was intended to be a review. You were supposed to take two classes online before the training; each class had about 3 hours of video and quizzes to go over. But many of the folks who were at the training never even looked at the site. So DataStax tried to cram tons of knowledge into everyone’s eye-socket in those six hours.
Honestly, I didn’t care about the certification, the training was more important to me. Hands-on usage of Cassandra is the only certification that’s really important here. If you don’t use Cassandra after getting your certification, then all that information you gained is likely lost within a few months of the course at best. If instead you set up a few nodes and tried to store/retrieve data from them after the online training, then you’d likely have the same level of knowledge as someone who passed the certification. Each of you will have some tidbits of information that help keeps that cluster alive.
I’m glad I went for the training. Having the certification is a nice ‘feature’… but it’ll actually mean something once we have Cassandra in production.