Oracle certified Professional DBA

Hi,

    I am planning on taking the OCP/DBA exams. I have been an oracle developer for a while and have really become a DBA by default(no one available) and have run a reasonable application for sometime now -1 year. I would like to take this exam primarily to legitimatize my experience. I have a couple of questions for people who have taken these exams.

1. What span of time do you typically take these exams , all four of them ?
2. Does cramming help at all ?
3. I have looked at the book by Couchman, the DBA certification guide and there is a lot of stuff I don't know in that. Does that make me a bad candidate for this exam ?
4. I can understand that experience is the best way to pass this exams, but is it impossible for someone with minimal experience to pass these exams by studying and such.
5. I haven't done much backup and recovery(lucky) but I have in place reasonable procedures for backup which has worked well for me. I have done one recovery with help from Oracle support( major disk crash) I believe I probably couldn't have done this without Oracle support. That bothers me in my capabilities as a DBA.
6. I haven't started writing these exams yet, I have Oracle 7.3 at my disposal for me to play around with, and not Oracle 8. Does anyone recommend I go straight for Oracle 8 certification or Oracle 7.3.

I have limited resources to take the test and would like to be in the best situation possible to take the test. I apologize if the questions seem amatuerish , just trying to alleviate my concerns.

Thanks a lot for your help.

RSV
rsvcool_at_yahoo.com

-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own Received on Tue Jan 05 1999 - 14:17:10 CST