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INTRODUCTION

There is an ever-increasing demand for staff with IT industry certification. The benefits to employers are significant (they can be certain that staff have a certain level of competence), and the benefits to the individuals, in terms of demand for their services, are equally great. Many employers require technical staff to have certifications, and many IT purchasers will not buy from firms that do not have certified staff. The Oracle certifications are among the most sought after. But apart from rewards in a business sense, studying for the exams is an enjoyable process that may allow you to investigate aspects of the database that you might not usually use.

Your initiation into the wonderful world of Oracle database administration is about to begin. You can study this for the rest of your life. Enjoy!

Oracle Certification

There are several Oracle certification tracks; this book is concerned with the Oracle Database Administration certification track, specifically for release 12c of the database. There are three levels of DBA certification: Oracle Certified Associate (OCA), Oracle Certified Professional (OCP), and Oracle Certified Master (OCM). The OCA qualification is based on two examinations; the OCP qualification requires passing a third examination. You can take these examinations at any Pearson VUE Center, in any order. The OCM qualification requires completing a further two-day evaluation at an Oracle testing center, involving simulations of complex environments and use of advanced techniques that are not covered in this book.

To prepare for the OCA/OCP examinations, you can attend Oracle University instructor-led training courses, you can study Oracle University online learning material, or you can read this book. In all cases, you should also refer to the Oracle Documentation Library for details of syntax. This book will be a valuable addition to other study methods, but it is also sufficient by itself. It has been designed with the examination objectives in mind, though it also includes a great deal of information that will be useful in the course of your work.

Study the material and experiment, and as you work through the exercises and sample questions and become more familiar with the Oracle environment, you will realize that there is one golden rule:

“When in doubt, try it out.”

In a multitude of cases, you will find that a simple test that takes a couple of minutes can save hours of speculation and poring through manuals. If anything is ever unclear, construct an example and see what happens. Note that this book was developed using Windows and Linux, but to carry out the exercises and your further investigations, you can use any platform for which the database is available.

The Examination

Here are some suggestions for approaching the exam.

An OCA/OCP exam will consist of multiple-choice questions, but it is multiple choice on steroids. The questions are not always “choose the best answer.” Sometimes the questions will ask you to “choose all correct answers” or “put the answers in the correct order.” Some questions are easy, some are hard, and some are confusing. You might be asked (for example) to “choose the best answer” and you will think, “All the answers are wrong!” or perhaps “But two of the answers are correct!” In that case, read the question carefully, and you may eventually see what they are wanting; the questions are often precisely worded.

The questions are fair and do not require feats of memory. You will not (for example) be asked if a view name is V$DATAFILE or V$DATA_FILE. But you might be asked whether V$DATAFILE or DBA_DATA_FILES is visible when the database is in mount mode. Fair enough: you should know whether a view is populated from the instance, from the controlfile, or from the data dictionary; you should know which of these structures is available in mount mode. This is not a matter of spelling; it is something you can work out.

The exam technique you should follow is to go through all the questions as quickly as possible, answering the ones you know and marking the ones you don’t (there is an option to do that). That first run-through will take you half the time. Then spend the rest of the time going over the questions you marked, again and again. At the end, there may still be a few questions where you have no idea. In those cases, just guess—there are no deductions for errors. The mistake you must not make is to try to do the questions in order because you will run out of time. And there might have been some easy questions at the end that you never looked at.

All the detail of how to book an exam is available on the Oracle University web site, http://education.oracle.com/certification.

Prerequisite Knowledge and Environment

This book was developed using Windows and Linux, from which come all the examples. To carry out the exercises and your further investigations, you can use any platform on which the Oracle database can be installed. Note that you cannot install Oracle on any 32-bit operating system. Do not get too hung up on whether your platform is supported. For example, Oracle does not support the database on any “home” edition of Windows or on Centos Linux—but these should work for learning purposes, no problem.

Clearly, you must be familiar with whatever command-line interface and graphical admin tools your environment offers. Oracle University uses Linux in the classroom, and some exam questions do have a Linux feel to them, so if at all possible, try to do at least some preparation on a Linux machine.

The releases of the database used for developing this book were 12.1.0.0 (a beta release, as you may notice in some screenshots), 12.1.0.1 (the first production release), and 12.1.0.2. You should download and install whatever the latest release currently available to you happens to be. Oracle University validates the exams against the first production release. When a new release (perhaps 12.2.0.1) is issued, Oracle University will revalidate all questions against the new release and adjust or remove any questions where changes in behavior could affect the answer. So, for exam purposes, it should not matter what release you use—but for practical purposes, you want to be on the latest one.

A Word on Unauthorized Sample Questions (aka Brain Dumps)

The chapter review and practice exam questions that come with this book are not actual Oracle exam questions; that would be illegal. However, they do cover the knowledge you should have. There is no point in memorizing the questions and answers. Treat them merely as a check of whether you have grasped the material. Some students like to go through many simulation exams (which you can buy or perhaps download for free—though the legality of these should be confirmed) repeatedly until they have a perfect score. We strongly believe that this is poor preparation technique. It proves nothing more than that you can pass a particular simulated exam. The only value of such material is if you question the answers, that is, you work out why the supposedly correct answer is correct and why the wrong answers are wrong. That is the way to address all the questions in this book. If you really feel the need to do a trial exam, why not simply schedule the real thing? You never know, you might pass the first time.

Download

For more information about the digital content, please see the appendix, “About the Download.”

Objectives Maps

Here you will find an objectives map for each of the three exams. The maps have been constructed to allow you to cross-reference the official exam objectives with the objectives as they are presented and covered in this book. The objectives are listed as presented by the certifying body with the corresponding chapter reference.