Re: Is Sr. DBAs afraid of not be able to pass cert exam ??

Tom Dyess doodled thusly:

> Woah, back up a minute - OCP certified and he doesn't know the
>difference in speed of memory and disks? You must be exagerating.
>

Who said it's a "he"? ;-)
No, I am not exagerating. I get asked questions by this person that would NOT be asked if it was aware of these differences.

Of course the OCP questions mention that. But do they explain or cover ALL the different possible combinations of their relationship? And ALL the possible ways they can interact? No, they don't.

And because the matter is not explained in the proper context but simply in a "mark the box" question of "what is faster, disk or memory?", people get the impression that this is all there is about it. Not so.

And then we get sites replacing 10X10Gb sized disks of 80Mb/s access speed by 2X50Gb sized disks of 120Mb/s access speeds, completely ignoring to ALSO upgrade the controller and its cache. And then they wonder why the performance is so bad and hasn't changed with the latest "upgrade", when the manufacturer "guaranteed" it would. "Must be the fault of those wretched ORACLE people again!"....

And so many other pearls of "marketing wisdom". I could go on and on describing some of the complete idiocy passing as "technical knowledge" these days, but it gets depressing.

Cheers
Nuno Souto
nsouto_at_optushome.com.au.nospam Received on Fri Feb 01 2002 - 07:57:23 CST