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Well,well, I just came back from the testing center. I have the feeling, the knowledge in the book is too out-of-date. I ordered the "self test" and found I can only pass 50% in the mock tests.
I have very little experience in administrating oracle database. After taking the real exam, I found the difficulty of the real test is between the self tests and the book. Fortunately, I passed, but the score is very tentative.I am not a DBA.
Does the "self test" over kill. The only purpose I learned OCA exam is because I think this is the best way to obtain the key skills.During the past 3 months, I am sure I totally digested this book. But finally I found this book is far from enough to pass the test.
If you only read this book and you do not have so much practical experience, I am sure you can not pass. However, I really had not any better books to read for the test.Good luck guys.
If you're wondering what book you should buy to read, buy THIS ONE.My only complaints are that the question cd is not particularly helpful. Having passed the OCA, I can say that this book has excellent coverage of the OCA exam (and presumably the OCP too). The questions on it aren't particularly close to the actual exam. I wouldn't bother buying any other study material for reading. The book is very comprehensive, and the topics are broken down into small digestible chapters. I would very much recommend that you buy a question set from a provider on the internet such as Ucertify (just be careful which provider you buy from, as some of them provide the *exact* test questions, which will invalidate your results. Ucertify is ok).Also be careful: The last chapter in section 1 (the section on languages and such) is in the OCP exam, not the OCA.
It feels like it was tossed together in 20 minutes from an import of a tab delimited list of questions and answers. This book will prepare you for the OCA/OCP exams, however, be aware before you start, the self-test software has the exams mismatched. The references for each question in the view section just refer you to the book, as a whole, no chapter number. The OCA exam is actually titled "OCP" and vice-versa, so if you cover the 1st half of the book, you'll need to take the "OCP" test on the software, the one with 75 questions.1) Read each chapter2) Take every quiz at the end of chapter3) Score yourself and review each wrong answerBy the time you are done and are ready for the practice test, you will be prepared.I do feel that there are a few too many errors, as other reviewers pointed out, but most of these will only hurt people who are just trying to "cram." For experienced DBAs, the errors will usually be obvious, and can be verified by doing the exercises. That said, errors are errors and should not be there if the book had been properly edited and reviewed.The self-test software gets 2 stars. Ridiculous. Scrolling the test review does not work, neither does the print function.If I were the author of certification guides I would guarantee with the utmost certainty that the book was accurate and helpful, by having several non-certified DBAs as _well_ as OCP DBAs review and take the chapter tests.Besides all that, I still give it 4 stars it is well presented, and if this book does not prepare you, then you are probably not doing the self-tests and exercises, and are looking for a cheat-sheet cliff-note format, and I don't want to hire any DBA that needs to be spoon fed to pass a certification.
This book has basic info for 10g R1 however exam questions based on knowledge of 10gR2 knowledge of ASM being one of them. Don't expect to pass using just this book.
i've found book quite interesting and what the most important "thinking-oriented" and helpfull to PASS the OCP exam.but i found a lot of errors in text, some that are just obsolete informations like env variable EMHOSTNAME, which may be fine in 10.1 but in 10.2 you have to use ORACLE_HOSTNAME instead, some others are typographic errors like calling column resource_manager_group but it should be resource_consumer_group (p855), forgetting to list BYDAY in interval specifiers (p866).But the other things are really unpleasent surprises:"maximum number is limited by the JOB_QUEUE_PROCESSES instance parameter; this defaults to 0, but if that value is used, the Scheduler will not function" -- not true -- see art. no 413399.1 and own practice as well.q7 in questions about scheduler: B)freq=hourly;interval=1/2 -- i got error ORA-27465: invalid value freq=hourly;interval=1/2 for attribute REPEAT_INTERVAL which was expected -- according to documentation so this is not proper anwser.on page 574 "Image copies can be made of datafiles, the controlfile, and archive logs. Image copies cannot be made of the spfile"-- but during copy of controlfile we have:RMAN> backup as copy current controlfile;Starting backup at 06-SEP-08using target database control file instead of recovery catalogallocated channel: ORA_DISK_1channel ORA_DISK_1: sid=153 devtype=DISKchannel ORA_DISK_1: starting datafile copycopying current control fileoutput filename=/u01/oracle/flash_recovery_area/ORCL/controlfile/o1_mf_TAG20080906T201002_4d5kvv6v_.ctl tag=TAG20080906T201002 recid=5 stamp=664747803channel ORA_DISK_1: datafile copy complete, elapsed time: 00:00:01Finished backup at 06-SEP-08Starting Control File and SPFILE Autobackup at 06-SEP-08piece handle=/u01/oracle/backup/cfc-1177494707-20080906-00 comment=NONEFinished Control File and SPFILE Autobackup at 06-SEP-08so it seems to be not true too.And the information which was the most surprising to me:tip on page 796 "The views V$ASM_DISK and V$ASM_DISKGROUP are onlypopulated in an ASM instance. They are always empty in an RDBMS instance".but oracle doc says: "In a database instance, V$ASM_DISKGROUP displays one row for every Automatic Storage Management disk group mounted by the local Automatic Storage Management instance".And talking about ASM one more important thing: there is no information about templates and aliases in ASM file names which one could get on exam test.that's not the complete list of errors i'm afraid.and it's worth to notice that from december '08 the contents of the book won't be enough to get OCA/OCP:http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getpage.page_id=231.regards.
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