Re: Is Oracle DBA cerificate useless ?!!!!

"Sam Talebbeik" <sam777t_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:9ec3a1ef.0106111411.574eac78_at_posting.google.com...
> So far the feedback that I have gotten has been very negative. One person
> even commented that the DBA training and the exam questions have nothing
> to do with the "actual" DBA work and the Oracle shops really do not care
 who
> has and who does not have a certificate.
>
> I am completely confused and I need more comments from Oracle old timers
> particularly those with a certificate.
>
> Doesn't the certificate actually show that you have the "minimum"
> requirements for a DBA job ? I looked at the course material for the DBA
> and it looks very relevant (PL/SQL, Installation, Perf monitoring, Backup
> and recovery).

As others have said the OCP cert only shows that you can pass 5 multiple choice exams on core dba skills as laid down by Oracle. So it means that if you pass the test you must have at least(1) an academic understanding of the way Oracle behaves and you as a DBA can control its behaviour.

If you are an employer however you would want to look as well as certifications at actual experience. Most DBA's are responsible for systems which can break the company when they fail. Experience counts loads when the chips are down and paper doesn't count for squat.

As an aside I am not one of those who says that a DBA *has* to have been a programmer or analyst beforehand. Clearly programming skills are important and the whole area of systems design is closely related. I'd also argue that conventional systems admin is closely related and that a strong business understanding is highly valuable.(2)

Finally I'd have more respect for some of the people who slate OCP if they stated that they had done it and passed and still regarded it as useless.

--
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
Audit Commission UK

(1) You may of course have a full understanding if you are as many DBA's do
taking a course to backup your experience with externally validated paper.

(2) As an example, in my workplace when we migrated from one financial
system to another we had a whole set of work waiting to be billed and part
of the data transfer involved mapping these across into the new system. A
significant part of this WIP was in fact old and pretty much unbillable -
either because of its age or because the original work was badly recorded.
We did the transfer which was a purely technical solution. What we could
have done is stripped out all the old chaff written it off and got folk to
rekey if it was later deemed necessary. This latter was a business process
suggestion. Obviously as everyone knows that techies have no business sense
we just transferred it and much of it is still sitting unbilled.