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Oracle Tips by Mike Ault |
Oracle Masters Program
The Oracle Masters programs are especially useful in that they take
the guesswork out of which classes you should take. Consult with
Oracle training about schedules and classes. For large Oracle
installations with large numbers of developers and administrators,
Oracle, and vendors such as
Burleson Consulting, will provide on-site classes that
may significantly reduce your training costs. Another good program
is the Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) Remote DBA certification
program. For a fee, you can go to any Sylvan Learning Center and
take a set of examinations that will determine if you have the
prerequisite knowledge to be a Remote DBA on Oracle. However, if you don’t
have at least two years of experience in Oracle and some training,
don’t waste your money. I have taken these exams; they aren’t a
piece of cake by any means.
If you have training on-site, don’t allow outside interruptions to
intrude upon the class. These can be disruptive and are rude to the
instructor. Besides, it wastes your training money.
Would you allow a first-time driver to just jump into the car and
drive off? It is amazing how many sites turn new and complex systems
over to personnel with perhaps a good background in databases but no
experience whatsoever in Oracle. Yes, there are generic issues, but
there are enough details specific to Oracle alone that training is
highly recommended. If it costs $20,000 to fully train a Remote DBA, isn’t
it worth it? How much money would it cost if the system were down
for several days while an inexperienced Remote DBA pored through the
manuals and tried to communicate intelligently with the Oracle help
line? What if a critical application were destroyed because of
something the Remote DBA did or didn’t do? At one site, an experienced Remote DBA,
new to the Oracle database system, didn’t follow the normal database
datafile-naming convention recommended by Oracle. Even though
backups were taken, they didn’t get the one SYSTEM datafile that was
named incorrectly. As a result, when an application required
recovery due to data corruption, the system couldn’t be restored.
This resulted in the users abandoning the application and investing
hundreds of hours reinventing it on Mac systems.
In my incarnation as a sysop on the Remote DBAPipeline at www.revealnet.com
and the lazyRemote DBA and Metalink forums I assist with, I answer newbie
questions on a daily basis that can usually be answered by looking
at the manuals. Don’t waste support analysts’ (and my) time by
asking us questions that you can answer yourself. Besides, I have
found I learn better if I look it up rather than have someone tell
me; I’m sure you have had the same experience. If you ask a question
that is easily looked up in Oracle manuals, I may answer “RTFM,”
which stands for "Read the f****** manual."
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