Re: Outrage that OCP exams are now unproctored - Comments?

"Niall Litchfield" <niall.litchfield_at_dial.pipex.com> wrote in news:3e136b64$0$226$cc9e4d1f_at_news.dial.pipex.com and I quote:

>
> Interestingly in the UK, I can't speak for the States or for Oz, most the
> *professions* run the training/exam system for members of the professions.
> This applies for Lawyers,Accountants etc. Rather than look to the State, I
> would wish to look to Industry bodies that had the clout to be recognized
> (and didn't just represent large supplier interests).

Bingo!

> You'd also get away
> from the entirely daft notion that you were an Oracle 8i or MSSQL 7 DBA and
> towards the fact that you were a DBA (or developer or what have you). They
> don't certify Accountants in the use of Sage or Pocket calculators (and
> certainly not in Excel). they train and test them in Accounting/Auditing
> etc.

Amen!

>
> I hope gives me some insight, then we should be moving away from software
> features based testing to testing and developing professional IT skills.

Absolutely. It's the only thing that cannot be faked.

> Things I'd suggest (from a DBA view point) would include
>
> Database Design

I'm not sure about this sort of thing. I tend to separate DBAs by type of work. The idea of the DBA-God that knows about everything is more akin to an earlier era where we could actually catch up with all the technology. Nowadays, that's impossible. I'd separate a development DBA from a production DBA. The prod DBA doesn't need to know about design. But he/she needs to know about the others:

> Physical Storage characteristics
> Security principles
> Set Operations vs Procedural Loops and when to use which.
> Backup Principles

> What is a transaction?

Design.

> Change Management
> SQL

> The development lifecycle

Design.

-- 
Cheers
Nuno Souto
nsouto_at_optusnet.com.au.nospam