Thoughts on GBase 8a Certification Training

By Li Geng

I’m Li Geng, a development engineer at BOC Financial Technology, mainly working on database ETL. I have two years of experience and have been using GBase for nearly two years, but I had never systematically studied GBase or earned any database-related certifications. So when the GBase 8a certification training opportunity came up, I signed up without hesitation.

The GBase training program was very well organized, with detailed video courses along with regular quizzes and exercises to help reinforce learning. There was also a training group where GBase instructors answered questions, and fellow students shared their doubts and insights, providing a valuable communication platform. Moreover, a teaching assistant posted daily progress reminders in the group, which greatly helped busy professionals like me keep up with the daily study routine.

Let me share an example of how the GBase training helped me better understand my work. In a previous project, we had a table with over 500 million rows to process, but the program kept running slowly. Eventually, we found the issue: we had omitted the DISTRIBUTED BY clause when creating the table. After adding it, the program finished quickly. At that time, I didn’t understand why—I just followed the example. Through the GBase training, I learned that without DISTRIBUTED BY, the table defaults to random distribution, whereas adding it creates a hash-distributed table, allowing lookups based on the distribution key to be much faster.

The course materials provided by GBase were incredibly helpful for grasping the underlying principles and usage of GBase. During the first exam attempt, I only skimmed the videos, took a couple of quizzes, and didn’t study the materials carefully. I failed by just 0.5 points. I learned my lesson, thoroughly reviewed all the course materials several times, completed the daily exercises, and truly understood the questions. As a result, I passed the second attempt with a score of 94.5. So my advice to those who follow is: make sure to study the course materials thoroughly and understand every concept—there are no shortcuts. Not only will you pass the exam, but your knowledge of GBase will grow enormously!