Who this article is for.
This article is really meant for DBA's with quite a long experience (maybe those who started with Oracle 7 or 8 ) rather than for younger ones, who would like to pass the Oracle certification OCP tests or are wondering whether it is worthwhile doing.
Becoming an Oracle Certified Professional is nowadays more useful for your own personal development than for your actual job advancement, at least in Switzerland. Judging from the newsgroups, this appears to be the case also in other countries; possible reasons for this devaluation are that the exams are multiple choice ones and that so many people simply train to pass the exams rather than to acquire a real Oracle understanding (which, of course, can only come from experience) etc.
In any case, if you are serious about it, getting certified will certainly not hurt you! (well, it does have a financial cost).
Very many companies offer products to pass the exams and this has been a roaring trade; one can actually spend a bomb to get prepared.
In the following we provide some advice, showing what we did in our company, keeping the cost down. Very many people will say this is not the right approach, that Couchman's book contains mistakes, that others are much better ... but our approach worked very well! Other, better solutions are of course welcome.
Which Oracle OCP path to take?
- For seasoned DBA's who are not completely familiar with Oracle9i, we recommend passing the 8i certification first and than upgrading (before the 8i path gets discontinued). This will keep known and still unfamiliar fields apart and will lead to the two exams with two different approaches.
- Make sure you download the exam guide and the exam objectives for each exam from the
Oracle education website. See what is required, because additional readings can be a waste of time if the subject is not included in the goals.
- Get the book:Oracle Certified Professional - DBA Certification Exam Guide
Published by: OSBORNE/MCGRAW
Author: Couchman, Jason Number of pages: 1200
ISBN: 0078825490
This book comes with a CD containing a mock exam. Go through the book at least twice for each section, making sure you don't skip anything.
Other good books (maybe better, maybe not) are the Sybex series; for example
OCP: Oracle8i DBA Architecture & Administration and Backup & Recovery Study Guide
by Doug Stuns . Each of thems comes with a CD containing several questions.
- The order in which you do the first five exams doesn't matter, but since "Performance Tuning" is the trickiest, you should leave it to last, so as not to be discouraged and really drill down to it. "Networking" is probably the easiest and most unlike the others, together with SQL and PL/SQL. The sixth one is, of course, the upgrade to 9i. So, a possible order is:
- Exam #1Z0-001 Introduction to Oracle: SQL and PL/SQL
- Exam #1Z0-026 Oracle8i: Network Administration
- Exam #1Z0-023 Oracle8i: Architecture and Administration
- Exam #1Z0-025 Oracle8i: Backup and Recovery
- Exam #1Z0-024 Oracle8i: Performance Tuning
- Exam #1Z0-030 Oracle9i Database: New Features for Administrators.
- Download all possible trial exams from the various companies that offer them! This gives you a good idea of what the exams are going to look like, even if the real exam is fortunately more sensible than the odd questions you can sometimes find in the commercial offers. The only resource we explicitly recommend here is the ExamCram Question of The Day. Each day you will receive via email a question pertaining to a certain subject for free.
- Consider that one month is the very least amount of time you need to prepare for each exam; for "Performance Tuning" at least two. For "Performance Tuning" try to learn where the various parameters can be found by heart (V$SYSTAT, V$SESSTAT, V$WAITSTAT etc.), because will certainly be asked!
- Gather the required information about the places and the dates where you can take the exam from the Oracle website. One exam costs in Switzerland about 200 CHF (something like 165$).
Remember that becoming an Oracle Certified DBA is first and foremost for yourself! And, more than this, that the output of UTLBSTAT/UTLESTAT is called report.txt!
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