How relevant is the underlysing OS?

I'm self-educating myself about Oracle using much of the Trialware that runs on WinNT, plus a bunch of books. My overall goal is to be able to develop applications using Developer/2000 and to do some basic DBA type activities. Everything I am doing now is on Win95 and WinNT.

My question is, how transferable is knowledge of Oracle to the various Operating Systems it runs on. For example, if I were to become a DBA and worked in an NT environment, would I be able to be a DBA in a Solaris or Linux environment? Or would I also have to intimately know the underlying OS?

Maybe another way of asking this is, Do I need to be a SysAdmin before I think of becoming a DBA? I have a PC/LAN background, so I have a lot to learn about midrange/mainframe OS's and Oracle itself.

I think I'm afraid if I learned all the basics and was going to try and switch careers, I'd go to a place with my new NT-based Oracle skills, and they'd sit me down in front of a Unix console and I wouldn't even know how to log in.

William Received on Mon Oct 25 1999 - 22:18:12 CDT