Archive for June 23rd, 2004
Mark Rittman points out that Oracle have just announced some changes to the OCP certification program. Chief amongst these is the news that it will only be necessary to pass 2 exams for the 10g DBA credential rather than the 4 currently required. The rationale for this is given as
By leveraging the innovative and automated features of Oracle Database 10g, Oracle University has significantly reduced the cost and time to train and certify.
I have to say that I’m not convinced. It probably is the case that 10g is easier to manage than its predecessors, but for me the education program was the single strong point of the OCP program. It has been far too easy for people with good memories, but little experience to pass the exams – if you want to go this route the exam cram books are good. As with the MCSE program this has meant that what is in principle a good thing has become, in practice, dilute. The quality of education that oracle themselves provide is excellent, but I cannot see how you can effectively teach all that is required to make good use of the power of the Oracle product in just 10 days. Exam 1 for example takes you from how to write a select statement to how configure backup sets and recover from various failure scenarios, by way of performance tuning and diagnosis and enterprise manager. In 5 days.
As it happens I do have the OCP certification, and am glad that I achieved it, but that was for the value of the education primarily, and the exposure to technologies that we don’t use.