Beyond Skills: How Certification Signals Credibility to Customers and Partners

Why ClickHouse training supports our goal of engineering excellence##What is the value of ClickHouse Certifications and why does it matter?

ClickHouse is a column-based On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) database management system (DBMS) originally developed by Yandex to power their analytics product offering. Those of you old enough to remember Dot-com Boom, might recall the likes of Sybase IQ that would run on big Sun Microsystems servers with tens of CPUs, and easily outperform row-based RDBMS (on the same hardware of course) for ad-hoc SQL queries that provide answers to questions that power business decisions. If this little historical parallel doesn’t mean anything to you, let’s just say that this type of product requires engineering focused on performance and efficiency in order to process huge amounts of data in record time, ultimately saving a lot of money. As engineers, we’re accustomed to expressing performance in terms of throughput and response time, but what the business is really interested in, is to hear performance expressed in terms of money saved (i.e. costs reduced). Think of it as cost per transaction kind of metric.
ClickHouse has unparalleled query performance and storage efficiency, and what is making it extremely competitive beyond just technical capabilities is the fact that it is open source. Thanks to that combination of factors, ClickHouse quickly became a go-to DBMS to power observability solutions, AI models, Business Intelligence warehouses, etc.

Alright, but what does it have to do with certification?

We, profiq s.r.o., are a software services company focused on providing the highest quality of engineering to our customers. As such, the core of our success is our engineers who have to keep up with the ever-changing ecosystem of technologies, knowledge, and expertise that differentiates us from the competitors. In this sense, the role of training and certification has two aspects: human and business.
Our engineers are motivated by acquiring knowledge and solving technical challenges. Training is an investment in their future and the future of the company. The certification exam is the challenge that keeps them focused on acquiring knowledge, and its consolidation. The certificate itself is a recognition that the challenge has been successfully completed.
As for the business aspect, the certification gives us an edge over the competitors and provides reassurance to our customers that we take our knowledge and expertise seriously.
ClickHouse training and certification fits perfectly our approach to knowledge acquisition. In our experience, the most effective way to train people is to practice as much as possible, having a set of objectives as the final goal. ClickHouse on-demand training allows our engineers to organise their time according to their and the needs of the project. The most important element of the training that facilitates the knowledge acquisition are the labs and materials for hands-on experience. And the best of all… it is all free! (Free of charge, as in beer.)
The certification process itself has clearly defined objectives and its open-book nature forces the engineer to learn the ClickHouse technology with the objective of developing the foundational knowledge to solve problems. In comparison, other certification exams tend to favour studying strategies to pass the exam rather than developing a deep understanding of the matter.

A little bit about the exam itself…

Rich Raposa of ClickHouse has done a great job in providing free materials for your certification journey. The most essential resource is the 1 0 module ClickHouse training. Be sure to watch the short video of how to prepare for the exam as it will give you a very good idea of what you’re up against.
On a personal note, I will share a few tips that helped me a lot and some that I wish I had known beforehand (this is my own fault for not paying attention):

• Listen to all videos in the 10 module training.
• Do ALL the labs, do not skip them; repeating lab exercises several times helps A LOT.
• After you exhaust the labs, practice with example data sets on the Tutorials page; focus on the certification exam objectives as guidelines and apply them on the example data sets.
• Learn how to solve your problems using just the documentation, it is your best friend.
• It is not very realistic to think that you can learn all available functions in ClickHouse, however it is important to get a very good idea to be aware of what they can do so that you can quickly locate the one that you may need for the given problem you need to solve.
• Be very comfortable with complex SQL queries, especially CTEs and JOINs. Develop those skills by trying to answer all kinds of analytical questions on big data sets. Practice the objectives related to performance (i.e. indexing, projections, primary keys, etc.) when those queries are slow.
• Try out the sample exam! This one comes with the invitation once you pay.

The exam does not have gotchas or trick questions. The more complex questions come with an example to clarify what is needed of you, so they are straightforward and only require you to follow the instructions. The exam is limited to 2 hours which is enough time provided that you have a good idea how to approach the problem. Even though you can use the documentation freely during the exam, it will not provide you with the solution to the problem you need to solve. It can only provide the right amount of technical detail if you know exactly what you need to search for. For instance, you will be asked to write a query for a set of data that answers a particular analytical question that might involve complex data types or manipulations of the columns. To resolve those, you will have to have a solid understanding of what kind of functions are available to you, and how to use them creatively. Even if you do not know the exact one to use, you would at least need a very good idea of where to look. Otherwise, if you are lost and out of ideas, there will not be enough time to find what you are looking for even with the documentation available.
Also, the replication and sharding is not among the exam objectives, but I personally found it to be a very good learning experience to set it up and to add additional complexity to the whole process of studying.
Good luck on your journey!