Re: Case study for interviewing Oracle DBA

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 13:07:53 -0800, Thomas Day <tomday2_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> The OCP is no substitute for
> experience and may even be dangerous in that it gives the holder a
> false sense of compentence.

If you're an actor and start playing a recurring/regular role as a doctor on ER (stay with me, this is relevant honest) on your first day you're taken aside by one of the real doctors they have on set as an advisor and told: "After a a few years of this you'll think you know enough to actually do some of these things for real. You won't. You'll know just enough to be dangerous."

Based on having done the 9i DBA track courses (and a couple of the 8i DBA track) that prepare you for the exams and having sat a couple of the exams (and scored 90%+ on the exam prep tests for all of them, 8i and 9i), along with working along side a number of consultants and contractors who were OCP certified (frequently fixing whatever foul up they've managed to create), that's pretty much how I view the OCP. Knows enough to be dangerous.

There are people with OCP certification who are good DBAs, thing is they're the ones who were good DBAs before they took the exams.

I think the problem is two fold. In the exams the questions seem to have been written more for being about things that are easy to ask multi-guess questions about than things that are likely to come up in real life. The second aspect is that candidates seem to approach the exams like they would a test in school, cram for the test then forget everything before moving onto the next test. Neither of these problems are unique to the OCP, they seem to apply to pretty much any certification programme

I'm not trying to say that I'm an expert, I've only been doing this for 8 years.

Anyhow, I've got enough letters after my name already.

Stephen

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