Fred’s Blog

One of my projects this summer was to get Oracle Certified. I already felt myself fairly strong in most aspects of Oracle database administration due to a 9-month course I took at BMCC. I found myself having to explain too often that this was not the “official” Oracle certification, however, so I finally decided I had better get on the bandwagon and pay for some exams if I was going to be taken seriously as a DBA.

While the test isn’t exactly easy, the subject matter is frankly not very deep compared to what we did in the BMCC course. I also had a few qualms with the book I used to prepare for the exam, OCA: Oracle 10g Administration I Study Guide. Most noticable was the presence of several different voices in the text– understandable in a book written by 4 people, but a little more editing could have been done to smooth out the edges. This is especially true in the Flashcard app that comes with the book; some sections were written with careful explanations of the answers while others just said “true” or “false” without comment.

Also annoying were a few factual errors in the text, and vague, misleading, or incomplete answers to questions (for example, in practice test 1, question 18, there is no NAMES.DEFAULT_DIRECTORY setting in the sqlnet.ora file, guys)… I frequently found myself arguing with the book. It is hard to call this a flaw, however, because it inspired me to dig deeper into the Oracle documentation to find out the “real deal”.

Despite my misgivings I found the book useful and, on the whole, well written. I had a couple of local Oracle installations that I could play around with, but the book provides copious screenshots of the GUI tools that should allow people without adequate server resources to get a fair sense of what to expect. One final note of caution is that the book is geared for 10g Release 2, and I did all my practicing on a R.2 server, but Oracle is not actually using the Release 2 exam until November 1 2006. So I studied a lot of material that wasn’t even on the exam. I didn’t notice that until the night before.

Well, anyhow, I passed! And I now have the right to have one of these tatooed on my forehead: