Re: Certifications don't count! (from one who has none)

We used to have an Oracle Certified Master. His knowledge and experience are OK, except limited to everything perfectly documented. Recently I downloaded Metalink Tars our institution opened in the past few years and browsed through some of them. This guy, who left for visa reason, showed absolutely no insight when it comes to troubleshooting, at least by reading his Tars. For instance, Oracle support walked him through starting 10046 trace event and later he loudly complained about trace files filling up the filesystem (we're not using MTS) and asked for help to stop it. I know everybody makes laughable mistakes once in a while. But the fact he probably never runs 10046 event, and intentionally omits many essential RPMs (strace, lsof, gdb, etc) on all Linux boxes points to his systematic ignorance. But the OCM title bought him great power in the department, so much so that some decisions were made between him and the director (manager's manager).

On the other extreme, one coworker got into the DBA group partly because she's an excellent test taker. She told me she never touched the database even once and passed OCP many years ago. You think she's bad? I strongly disagree. A PhD in Biology, a top graduate from the top Chinese college, this person has excellent intelligence, dedication to work, general troubleshooting skills, and insight. Knowledge helps solve problems. But a lot of problems can be solved with basic knowledge and a great deal of common sense. She earned a lot of credit from app teams by solving many of the production problems that don't need a rocket scientist.

I know isolated cases never speak volumes. The two cases here may not be typical, but do exist.

Yong Huang       

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l