Re: Oracle Certification

"Hans Forbrich" <forbrich_at_yahoo.net> wrote in message news:doP7c.434$wg1.378_at_edtnps84...
| lark wrote:
|
| > Hello everyone,
| >
| > first off, I apologize if i am posting to the wrong group.
| > can anyone of you help me find a a decent bootcamp or training camp
| > provider for oracle dba type of training?
|
| You are not in the wrong group.
|
| However, you will get a number of very stupid answers. For example, one
| instructor at a Western US based University will insist that Oracle
| Certification is a waste of time and money and go no further ... he is
| reacting to your header and not bothering to read your question. On this
| point he insists on spouting steam but has not provided any suitable
| alternative ... his class has limited enrollment and seems to be full for
| the next 35 years so even THAT is not an alternative. (Other than this
| point, I have a lot of respect for him!)
|
| There have been a number of problems with Oracle Certification, not the
| least being historically some curriculum (especially self study) and some
| exams have had some errors. The anti-certification group will lead you to
| believe that all the exams (even all questions) are in error and all the
| courses and instructors are bad.
|
| That BS out of the way - there are several places you can get decent
| training. One place is through Oracle Education
| (http://education.oracle.com) with their online library as well as
| instructor led courses. Relevant training sources from Oracle and Oracle
| partners are available from the same Education site.
|
| My suggestions are as follows:
|
| - Ask yourself WHY you want training. There are many, many areas of study
| in Oracle. Do you want to DBA, develop, use, design - each is different
| and each has subcategories (eg: DBA - day to day vs performance - see the
| Oracle Concepts guide at http://docs.oracle.com)
|
| - Do not start with Certification as your first goal. The certificate does
| not have the credibility or demand that new people think it might have.
If
| you get it as a result of the studies, great - but don't make it the top
| priority.
|
| - Note that certification can be good if it's used as a framework for
| instruction. (But acknowledge that other frameworks can exist).
|
| - Use Google or other search engine to find candidate schools in your
| geography.
|
| - Interview them, especially the instructors. Ask why Oracle
Certification
| seems to be viewed negatively by Oracle 'professionals'. Ask what errors
| in the course material or exams they have detected. Ask how they get
| around that in the course. If they say none, then walk as they are lying
| or don't know better! You are paying them money, you have the right to
| find the best value for your $ and that can only be accmplished by asking.
|
| By the way - the 'comp.database.oracle' heirarchy is fairly dead - you
want
| the 'comp.databases.oracle' (s at the end of databases) and specifically
| the 'comp.databases.oracle.misc'
|
| HTH
| /Hans
|

well-put hans -- can i hire you as a marketing consultant? nah, you seem too honest for that ;-)

certification as a concept is good, but unfortunately it has been somewhat of a marketing ploy and a bit out of touch with real-world scenarios. unfortunately, a lot of training material as well as oracle texts (including, but not limited to Oracle Press) have a great deal of inaccuracies (which is why a lot of training material has the same errors -- just with slightly different table names)

whatever study and training you pursue, test every example, and evaluate it in the context of developing (maintaining, deploying tuning, supporting) an actual application -- too many training examples are so dummied down that they ignore all other aspects of how the subject technology would actually be used. for example -- taught a course once that addressed the mutating table issue of row-level triggers by showing an autonomous transaction trigger that committed derived data -- independent of the triggering transaction. then there is the ever-popular 'SELECT ... WHERE HIREDATE LIKE '%88'

when evaluating training, look for instructors who have a breadth and depth of actual project experience. also, take advantage of user group meetings, especially those that have follow-on workshops. do a lot of testing on your own, and when you run into problems, post specifics in this neighborhood and, if you've tried to get it to work and supply specific code, error, version, and target criteria, you'll get excellent assistance.

;-{ mcs Received on Tue Mar 23 2004 - 06:48:08 CST