Re: Best Oracle DBA Certification Study Guide

In article <7hs8sk$3q14$1_at_newssvr01-int.news.prodigy.com>, "mark zaman" <itsanact_at_hotmail.com> wrote:
>Hi:
>
>I was about to buy the Exam Cram and the New Riders title too but the
>reviews in Amazon were not too encouraging. Especially lot of readers who
>were expecting a lot from the exam cram book were disappointed. They wrote
>on the online reviews that the book contained several mistakes. I skimmed
>through the New Riders book which was o.k but I think it lacked details.
>
>From my understanding from reading through many Oracle book reviews on
>Amazon.com and newsgroups plus www.orafaq.org is that the OCP tests are
>derieved from two sources. Oracle Instructor Led courses which run $2500 and
>above (studybooks are provided by Oracle; these books are not available
>outside these courses) and the Computer Based Training CD's which Oracle
>sells in a partnership with NETG. These CD's run around $1400 for three
>courses combination or $600 each. Pretty steep but hey they have no
>competition. CBT Systems sells them too, pretty much the same price.

I doubt that the CBTs will prove very useful. I evaluated them as a training resource at one company. recommended against them, and management bought them anyway. The cost savings over real training was their motivation. It didn't work though. They sat on the shelf and gathered dust - after the first few people tried them.

At my current job, my ex-manager brought a huge box of them to me one day. About thirty of the CBT courses. Without even consulting anyone who could spell "sqlplus" he had traded in a very substantial bank of training credits for them! After I got over my initial shock and outrage, I decided "what the hell" and tried some of them - again. Under NT 4.0 WS, the first wouldn't even install without crashing (I tried it on three different machines at work and at home. Another DBA tried it also.). The second was deeply flawed: A PL/SQL course shouldn't flunk you for using the "wrong" case (as in "select" vs "SELECT") since the language is case-insensitive! Altogether, I tried five of them and the other DBA tried four or five of them. We both found them to be, at best, outrageously tedious. Each screen usually has only a sentence or two (if that) or information.

In the last five years, I've trained or help train about 20 Oracle DBAs - many from other systems, like Sybase, Informix, etc. None but the barest rookies ever got much out of the CBTs and even then it took ten times as long as it should have!

Based on my experience with at least a dozen different CBT courses over the last four years, I seriously believe that the CBTs are so unusable that they should be rethought, redesigned, and rewritten entirely or they should be discontinued. And I vote for discontinued. Nobody likes anything about them except Oracle education sales reps and managers trying to cut costs at any cost! They have very few of the advantages and nearly all the disadvantages of every other way of learning: Classes are expensive, but CBTs are not cheap - books are cheap. You can't ask either a book or a CBT a question. It isn't easy to use a CBT in bed or on an airplane. You can't quickly and easily skip the sections you already know in a class or on a CBT. Ad infinitum...

CBTs also have quite a few unique disadvantages: Books and classes don't crash! And they don't flunk you for saying "where ..." instead of "WHERE". And both give you a *lot* more information in a *lot* less time than CBTs!

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