Unfortunately the conversion to the blackhole storage engine didn't go as smoothly as planned, due to unexpected date-time dilation effects along the event horizon. Details are sketchy ("Query OK, ∞ rows affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)"), but it appears the insertion of a date with the value 0000-00-00 into the black hole would have introduced an irreconcilable paradox into the Einsteinian space-time continuum and caused life as we know it to end.

Fortunately I was able to import the emergency reserve system from the backup punchcards using PostgreSQL's COPY command.

The post-mortem disaster review has lead me to the conclusion that I should have obtained this particular MySQL certification first.