[gexla]

You don't need any sort of school or certifications to learn programming or database administration. All that does for you is takes up precious time you probably won't have to be bored to tears in a classroom environment and having to study for tests. Each hour in a classroom or studying for a test is an hour you could be using for actual programming or messing around with databases.

The best way to learn this stuff is to come up with some sort of pet project in your spare time. If you don't come up with something interesting to work on then you won't learn. Also, this probably needs to be an ongoing thing so that you can keep up your skills. Time spent in a classroom and then never revisiting the material won't help you much, you will learn things half assed and you will forget the little that you learned.

Who knows, maybe you could identify a real problem, come up with a great solution and then build a business from that. If you run into problems which require programming, then that's a great area to address a need which you could potentially profit from.