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RE: Real world OCP

From: Philip West <P.West_at_g-icap.com>
Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 11:26:15 +0100
Message-Id: <10544.110887@fatcity.com>


...and 'Oracle Corp certifying you as an expert in your field' simply means that you payed out a huge wad and remembered some stuff!

I'm a long way with Bill here (and I have no more than a high schoool education + 3 years as an engineer + 9 years as a military radio and radar technician + 11 years in IT of which 7 are as an Oracle DBA in its various guises)

At the moment OCP (Only Confirms Payment) is as useful to me as one of the degree certificates that I could buy off the web. I would only want OCP if someone else would buy it for me or if I began to find it difficult to get clients without it. I do not insist that my staff have OCP. I interview them. Maybe there is a market out there for skilled interviewers who just pop in for the day and screen applicants.

Regards

Phil West - Impex IT ltd
Unix Sys Admin and Oracle Financials DBA Services

[ all opinions - unless otherwise stated - may be ill-informed and will be defended as such! ]

-----Original Message-----
From: Jack Silvey [mailto:JSilvey_at_XOL.com] Sent: 30 June 2000 00:56
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: RE: Real world OCP

Bill,

We do not need a piece of paper to tell us we have the skillset to do the job. We use our pieces of paper to demonstrate that we have mastered the theoretical knowledge required to do the job.

Your diatribe reminds me of a factory worker grousing about how he "don't need no college degree because he can do the job."

The difference is in credibility, not knowledge. You saying that you can do the job is different from Oracle Corp certifying you as an expert in your field.

Change of this type is inevitable. I suspect that your disdain of professional certification does not stem from the belief that it is inheriently wrongheaded.

Jack Silvey
OCP x 2
senior @ xol.com

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2000 5:45 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

At 11:59 AM 6/29/00 -0800, you wrote:
>I agree with a lot of what you say, Patrice. As far as the life and death
>issues and DBAs, I imagine there are some people on the list who could tell
>war stories of when DBA skills really did come down to literal life and
>death decisions, but most of the time it's just a matter of pressing the
>right buttons in an organized way or killing someone's week's business, or
>indeed their business as a whole. I definitely think some kind of licensing
>is in order.

If you guys need a piece of paper to tell you that you have the skill sets to be
a dba then you are in the wrong job. i have managed to keep from ever losing
a database sense i started over 8 years ago, and it did not require a license,
just some dedication, the ability to read a manual and lots of hard work. Great
people who want more and more red tape and control, just what this country needs.

>There is of course an unfortunate side effect to this line of
>reasoning: if people are licensed to do DBA work then they are responsible
>for doing it right. That's fine, but when the lawsuits get started people
>are going to need liability insurance for their work. As soon as that
>liability insurance comes in the door a lot of the profitability of the
>business is turned over to lawyers.
>
><tangent> Seems like that happens a lot. Perhaps we should start an export
>program for lawyers. We could send lawyers to other countries that a have a
>shortage of legal professionals. We could establish an entire fleet of
>salt-bottomed boats exclusively for shipping lawyers to third-world
>countries who need them.</tangent>
>
>I also like the idea about engineer qualifications. Since the DBA
profession
>is closely associated with engineering it may be a good model. Of course
one
>advantage for the hands-on training and testing programs for a DBA as
>opposed to someone who repairs arteries or builds bridges is that we can
>build simulators that use actual Oracle8i databases. Thus our simulation is
>nearly 100% accurate. The only thing that might require a little software
>trickery is simulating a VLDB environment without using the actual
resources
>required for a VLDB.
>
>Regards,
>Chris Gait
>--
>Author: Gait, Christopher
> INET: cgait_at_condor.nrl.navy.mil
>
>Fat City Network Services -- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051
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-- 
Author: Bill Conner
  INET: bconner_at_verio.net

Fat City Network Services    -- (858) 538-5051  FAX: (858) 538-5051
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To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
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-- 
Author: Jack Silvey
  INET: JSilvey_at_XOL.com

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Received on Fri Jun 30 2000 - 05:26:15 CDT

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