 |
Win your Oracle Dream Job!
Colleges don't teach the expert tips and
secrets for getting an Oracle job and acing your Oracle job
interview with
The Oracle Job Interview Handbook. Order directly from
Rampant
and save 30%.
|
|
|
Let's
examine what it takes to rightfully call yourself an Oracle expert.
The criteria for the title of "Oracle Expert"
In my humble opinion, it's difficult not to become an
Oracle expert after a decade of full-time experience. However, it's the
nature of the experience that matters most:
-
Real-world experience - The path to true Oracle
expertise is paved with working on real-world, mission-critical Oracle
databases. No amount of at-home experimentation can compare with the
learning from working on a real production database. Many aspiring
Oracle experts will work for free for non-profit charities in order to get
this experience.
-
Quality experience - There is a wide variation
in the quality of experience in the Oracle workplace. Not all
experience is created equal, and a challenging high-performance database job
will provide far more expertise exposure than baby-sitting a stable
database.
-
Broad experience - A broad base with many
different types of Oracle database is essential for developing expert
status. I've been in shops with over 20 DBA's, where job duties are
highly segmented and Oracle professionals are relegated to "niche" work,
like security administration, or full-time patch application. On the
other hand, a single DBA is more likely to get a broader range of
experience. The best place to get experience is as an Oracle
consultant where you are exposed to dozens of novel databases each year.
A well-rounded Oracle DBA will have experience in many areas including OLTP,
OLAP and batch databases.
We see these general types of Oracle databases, and an
Oracle expert should have exposure to these types of Oracle databases:
What type of Oracle expert are you?
Today, Oracle technology has become so broad that we see
areas of expertise emerging. We also see these common "types" of specialty
Oracle DBA's, each with their own specialized areas of expertise. Again,
10 years of real-world full-time experience is enough to fully master these
areas:
-
Oracle replication expert - Experience with
multi-master replication, Data Guard and Streams can make you an expert at
Oracle replication.
-
Oracle RAC expert - Experience deploying
production OPS and RAC database is all it takes to garner Oracle RAC expert
status.
-
Oracle tuning expert - Many large Oracle shops
have DBA's who specialize in performance optimization, instance tuning and
SQL tuning.
-
Oracle warehouse expert - These Oracle DBA
experts have experience with VLDB administration (partitioning), Oracle OLAP
tools (Discoverer, Oracle warehouse Builder (OWB), and Oracle Data Mining
(ODM)).
-
Oracle apps DBA expert - These Oracle DBA's
handle the Oracle Application Server, Oracle 11i eBusiness suite, and the
concurrent manager.
In sum, becoming an Oracle expert requires three things,
real-world experience, broad experience and quality experience.
What about OCP certification?
I don't believe that OCP or OCM certification, by itself,
makes anyone an Oracle expert. I've worked with dozens of "newly-minted"
OCP holders, many of whom take the OCP test to advance from a position as an
Oracle developer of programmer. The OCP only measures rote memorization
skills, and many brand-new Oracle DBA's are not capable of managing a real-world
Oracle database without hands-on experience.
Next, see my notes on
becoming an
Oracle guru.
 |
If you like Oracle tuning, see the book "Oracle
Tuning: The Definitive Reference", with 950 pages of tuning tips and
scripts.
You can buy it direct from the publisher for 30%-off and get
instant access to the code depot of Oracle tuning scripts. |
