Re: Getting Experience with Oracle

whetstron_at_yahoo.co.uk (Sam Whetstron) wrote in message news:<737e2c7a.0411230507.2b692209_at_posting.google.com>...
>
> Frankly, I'm convinced I'd learn it a lot better if I had some form of
> motivating factor (e.g. commercial project) than messing around with
> it on my own (I'm know myself well enough to be able to say that).

That is a very positive way of looking at it. I read into this that you find classes a bit fake, and if so, learn to grit your teeth and grind through classes, because there is so much to Oracle, and you can wind up with bad habits if you figure everything out alone. But not only does oracle allow downloads, they will start pushing the development tool du jour at you if you let them. A relational theory class can really help sort things out if you haven't already done that.

>
> Either way most folks seem to fall into it via one of these 2
> > routes (support or development), the other thing that maybe a route in is
> > being knowledgable about some other Enterprise class database (as of today
> > I'd say that was DB2,MSSQL, and arguably, mySQL) and being asked to 'look
> > after' an Oracle system as well - this corresponds to the class of Job ad
> > that says "DB2 administrator required, Oracle an advantage" or similar.
>
> Most jobs that mention Oracle *seem* to "require" it... I might be
> able to bullshit my way round this (without outright lying, which is
> probably bad, not least from a practical point of view).

The mistake you are making here is assuming the jobs advertised for are representative of the jobs available. While you can certainly get an idea of what's hot by looking at the job boards, those postings are almost all by middlemen (HR droids or headhunters). Most jobs are not filled in this manner (of course that's an unfounded assertion, but both my personal observations and some job-advice people support it).

What you need to do is find an organization that uses Oracle, preferably through someone you know, and sidle into the database side from whatever skills you have. Once you have the experience you can be more picky, and then the job postings may apply.

My experience may be skewed, but my observation is that most people working on Oracle started out on something else. Sometimes even being told they are "the Oracle DBA" one day, 'cause no one else knows about computers.

jg

--
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http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1729523,00.asp