Re: Advice on how to become an Oracle DBA

Jeff Stagno wrote:
>
> I am presently an MCSE working on a international Windows NT contract.
> I am very interested in becoming an Oracle DBA and I was wondering
> where should I start. I have recently bought a few Oracle books from
> Oracle Press (Oracle: A Beginner's Guide, and an Oracle PL/SQL intro
> book) and have really dived into them. I am also going to buy Oracle
> Personal Server to load on my PC at home so i can work through the
> examples. I would love to take the Oracle classes, but time does not
> permit me to do that right now.

Nothing like lots of experience and getting it is usually shear luck. There is no book that can teach you how to become a DBA. There are good references that help you perform better. As someone else said, get a job as a coder first. At the same time get a good book on Relational algebra and Object Oriented design. The biggest problem I've seen with a number of DBAs is they do not have a basic understanding of relational algebra.

I recommend you go with Windows/NT at home. I was planning on doing this myself until my project just purchased 35 P120 boxes with NT4.0. Windows3.1/95 just isn't reliable enough.

-- 

Ed Bruce
<Bruce_at_ha.hac.com>
<ebruce_at_iquest.com>