Re: Getting Experience with Oracle

"Niall Litchfield" <niall.litchfield_at_dial.pipex.com> wrote in message news:<41a25122$0$2867$cc9e4d1f_at_news-text.dial.pipex.com>...
> "Sam Whetstron" <whetstron_at_yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:737e2c7a.0411221012.4837893f_at_posting.google.com...
> > Obviously, Oracle isn't freely downloadable

Yeah.... I was wrong. I can't put that one down to anything but lazy assumption. :-(
Thanks to everyone who wrote with info on this. It seems I was right in assuming it would be a major PITA to install, though, but I'm going to have to bite the bullet on that one.

> The
> other common route in is through being asked to develop stuff against
> Oracle, the smart people try to figure out how to use Oracle well, the not
> so smart people view all databases as a black box data store for application
> data. There are less smart people than foolish people and sadly the ratio is
> not improving.

I'm the guy that assumed Oracle wasn't free, so I'm keeping my mouth shut here.
Seriously, the problem I am running into is that a large number of jobs nowadays are asking for some level of previous expertise in Oracle.

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).

 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).

> There is a response to your question, edited for HTML by me but authored by
> Howard Rogers (www.dizwell.com) , about 2/3 the way down this page of mine
> http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com/archive/2004_06_01_archives.html

Thanks for that; I'm just about to read it... Thanks again to everyone else who replied; it's good that I got some constructive stuff instead of having my head bitten off (like I probably deserved after not bothering to check my facts. >:-/ )

Cheers!
- Sam Received on Tue Nov 23 2004 - 07:07:50 CST