Re: Passing the OCP Exam

On Fri, 29 Jun 2001, Ravi Alluru wrote:

> I was also interested in doing my OCP. Which training material /books did
> you use.
> I am currently working with Geo-Quest / Schlumberger as a DBA/Analyst on
> a contract.
> I cannot afford the Oracle trainig course .
> Could you recommend other ways . Or if you have training material which
> you used I could buy it from you.

I have passed three of the 8i exams. My primary resource is the book by Jason Couchman from McGraw-Hill.

The book does have some flaws. Some of the examples and discussion are just plain wrong, some of the material is extremely evasive (as most Oracle books are, especially on backup/recovery)...

And the worst thing is that the three chapters for Net8 are now only available in PDF form packaged on the CD included with the book.

The tests that I've taken seem to have some material that simply isn't covered with Couchman, although I passed the admin and backup exams by a wide margin.

I've heard that it's impossible to pass the Microsoft exams by just reading the textbooks, but that doesn't appear to be the case here. Be prepared to think on your feet, though.

There is also a great deal of important material that is not covered by the exams in general (snapshots, database links, sqlplus /nolog, partitions and IOTs get slight discussion for the admin exam at least, the question of online redo when using online backups, recovery with selected datafiles rather than the entire database, threats about crashes during checkpoints that appear to be groundless, the importance of a controlfile trace as opposed to a backup controlfile, but I could go on for a LONG time...).

I still have a way to go with this sequence, but I am somewhat frustrated by what I'm NOT going to learn with it. Oracle should make this more of a community effort.

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