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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: the ora certified masters cert, yet again
I always enjoy your posts Ian. Seems to me like schmoozing has been involved
so maybe OCM should stand for Oracly Certifiable Marketeer.
I like Rachel's point that the tests reflect what Oracle is currently pushing and not what real DBA work is about. Even though they are probably the most objective way to measure knowledge en mass, good tests are difficult to create and maintain. The problem is that the current tests are not very good. Why are we so dependent on Oracle Corporation for this anyway? It would be nice if IOUG could come up with a good set of tests without any input from Oracle Corporation. Sharing amongst peers and helping users in their professional development with Oracle database technology... Isn't that part of the IOUG charter? Am I expecting too much of IOUG? Or are we collectively demanding too little?
If it were done well, an independent set of tests could gain respect among the HR headhunter folks. Or we could just continue with the current compromise...
Steve Orr
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, June 25, 2002 3:41 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
A tip o' the hat to all authors and presenters. However writing a book
makes no one an expert on anything. There are Oracle books containing
fabulous stories of what happens when a tablespace is put in backup mode,
and while quite entertaining they do not further a correct understanding of
Oracle. Authors take the time to put what they believe to be true on paper.
It's often what they have been told, not what they have learned on their
own. Richard Niemiec's sp? tuning books have been trashed recently because
they tout buffer hit ratios; however there was a consensus in the Oracle
community that these were important. It took Cary Millsap's paper and a new
tuning paradigm introduced by Gaja Vaidyanatha, Kirtikumar Deshpande, and
John Kostelac Jr. to direct us to something more useful. Personally, I was
using wait events before Gaja's book, but I was also trying to keep the hit
ratio's high as a part of the "consensus". If I had written a book before
seeing Cary's pap!
er!
!
, it
would have touted hit ratios. I don't believe "Oracle 101 Performance
Tuning" is a perfect book; it doesn't properly address data collection
needs.
Why would authorship and presentations be worth more than an OCP? The OCP says that you have achieved a standard. One can debate whether that standard has any meaning. There is no standard at all for authors/presenters. It does seem however that many OCP holders know far less than their certificate would indicate, and some authors are more expert than their books convey. A good author of Oracle tomes and presentations needs a clearer understanding of the subject matter than an OCP. Good authors hold themselves to higher standards than needed to be called an OCP. I just want to point out that not all authors are good authors, and that there are OCP holders who have not written books that are as if not more knowlegeable than most authors. There are people who have done neither who know as much if not more than both.
The OCM was introduced for two reasons. Oracle is in business to make money and wanted another revenue stream, and the standards one must meet to become an OCP were being questioned. Unfortunately at last years IOUG-A conference the six people who were given their OCM's were touted as the six most knowledgeable Oracle experts in th world. The awardees did not include Gaja, nor Kirti, nor Anjo Kolk, nor Steve Adams, nor Jonathan Lewis, nor Guy Harrison, nor Larry Elkins... Indeed only one person on the awarded the OCM would I have placed in any top six list, and that's Paul Dorsey who is extremely knowlegeable concerning Oracle's development tools. There were some awardees I know nothing about. Despite this over-the-top rollout, the OCM under proper care could become a certification with real meaning, by that I mean more important than being an author or a presenter
Ian MacGregor
Stanford Linear Acclerator Center
ian_at_SLAC.Stanford.edu
--
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
--
Author: Orr, Steve
INET: sorr_at_rightnow.com
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