DBA Wannabe

I passed!

The OCA certification was not an easy exam for me. It was evident that I need to gather more experience in the day to day workings of Oracle 10g Database. Two months of hitting the books and working out the hands on issues is just not enough.

The exam contained 90 questions and took me 1 hour 20 minutes to complete (Linux+ exam only took me 20 minutes). I had to really think through some of the questions due to my lack of experience.

Next step is the OCP certification. However, I think it would be best that I try and find a way to gather some on the job or more hands on experience over the next little while before I even begin to think about the OCP.

Anyone out there need a junior DBA? Internship possibilities?

Certification exam in 2 days and I'm all studied out. While I can pretty much do much of what management needs, install Oracle 10G on linux, create database, setup users and schemas, assign roles and configure profiles, setup metrics, run reports, do flashback recovery to utilizing RMAN... List goes on, but I can't honestly say I can answer any question thrown my way up to OCA level.

Terminology is crucial, but difficult when you've go so many features overlapping. RMAN and SQL*Loader, Flashback recovery and using tablespace point in time recovery (TSPITR) are some examples. Takes years to master, and I've been cramming it in the past 2 months.

I am not doing too bad, I took the Oracle university's Admin I final and missed only 4 out of 72 questions. I just hope the vendor examination utilizes similar line of questioning without getting tricky with the wording. Like I said, 2 months isn't enough time to get 100% intimate with something as big as Oracle DB.

Oracle doesn't give away their certifications. I just hope that if I pass I can get a junior dba position somewhere that I can get more intimately familiar with Oracle. Build up enough experience to make the OCP certification easier to swallow.

Wish me luck on my exam!

My first post on this new topic. A few months back I decided it was time to make some changes to my already dead career path. I had been tinkering with the idea of becoming an Oracle DBA for some time and finally decided to knuckle down and focus on that direction.

What is an Oracle DBA? Basically DBA stands for Database Administrator and Oracle is the company that makes the best Relational Database in the world. Not to mention a huge beast - but an effective one. So basically I hope to spend my remaining career days being an Oracle database administrator and expert. For now, I am just a green DBA wannabe.

Before I started the course, I passed my Linux certification which is an important part of a DBA. Sure you can run Oracle on Windows, but what nut would do that? Its important that a DBA understands the operating system in which they are deploying Oracle Database on in terms of file system, permissions handling, User management, LDAP or NIC and so on. Of course bash shell, which is the operating systems command line tools. Makes life easier if you are comfortable with shell and shell scripting for automating repetitive mundane tasks.

Anyway, I'm on my 4th week of the Oracle University course. There has been an insane amount of material to cover. Linux was easy as I have been using it for years, but Oracle is new territory for me. There are tests weekly to make sure I am absorbing the material. Fail a test and you don't move on. Theres 5 weeks in the OCA Administration Workshop I, so I am just about done. I am hoping to land the OCA certification at the end of this month.

I have a nice setup in which to familiarize myself with Oracle. I have an Apple MacBook Pro with 2gb of ram. I run Oracle10g on CentOS on virtual machine using Parallels.

Basically I just fire up the VM, dbstart and then emctl start dbconsole to get the components up and running. Then I just open browser on the mac side to access the Enterprise Manager.

I run sql*plus within the VM using the terminal provide with Gnome. (Gnome is a linux gui). I noticed in the beginning that sql*plus kept no history as I would enter the queries. This was quite annoying. I found a solution to that problem on the Dizwell.com website. There's an rpm you can install called RLWRAP. You can find it in the link here: http://www.dizwell.com/prod/node/56.

You can learn a LOT from Howard Roger's website. It was there that I got the idea about utilizing VM to learn different OS and Oracle. VM's make very flexible and good dev testing platforms, considering you have enough Ram and drive space. I wish I got 3GB instead of just 2 on this laptop.

Well, I've over done myself here. I better get back to studying!