DBA and certification questions?

This question is to all the oracle experts out there: If you had to hire an Oracle DBA, what would you be looking for?

I've been playing the role of a DBA at my current company. I have worked with oracle for almost 10 years, however from the vantage point of an application developer, so my areas of competence are in things like datamodeling, pl/sql, oci etc...

Right now, I've been doing both jobs, but I have no experience in all the back end things that most dba's should have competencies in like storage and index management, backup, replication, tuning, etc, etc...

We're on the verge of getting budget approval to bring in real DBA and I'll be responsible for hiring this person.

My first priority is look for experience first, regardless of certification... Should my next criteria be certification? Is certification that important?

Also, (I know nothing about the certification process), when you get certified, are you certified for a specific version of Oracle on a specific Platform?? I would think that someone who was certified and only worked with Oracle 7.3 on NT may not be ideally suited to working with Oracle 8.1 on Solaris etc...am I right?

Also is certification just one "catch-all" acomplishment? In other words, can your certification be focused in a particular area (like OLTP, or datawarehousing etc...???)

If there are any pointers that anyone wishes to share (things to look for, questions to ask), I'd be much obliged.

Is it common to have someone take an oracle test during an interview? I'm considering pulling out specific questions from the DBA study book and having the applicant complete this test. Does anyone have any good scenario questions I might want to focus on?

Our business is web based (when we go live...probably 6 months down the road) and is going to run with an oracle backend database server...so this is a very critical hire.

Thanks,
Gavin

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http://www.keen.com Received on Wed Jul 19 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT