Oracle Certified Professional DBA Certification Exam Guide [With Includes DBA Practice Test & Other Material...]

I have just qualified oracle7.3 dba. This book served as the core of my preparatory material. I attended no courses or seminars. I believe there is no suitable substitute for anyone seeking certification

I browsed through each of the certification books at a local bookstore before deciding on this one. I wasn't disappointed, and it was a lot of help in getting ready for OCP certification. I used this book mostly for the DBA material, and the Complete Reference book for extra material on SQL and PL/SQL.

Study this book and you'll pass the OCP. I did

Everything that an Oracle Administrator needs is in this book! I used this book to get OCP certified for both versions 7 and 8. Unit 5 for the Oracle 8 new features could be more complete, and there are some mistakes throughout the book - so be careful. Mr. Couchman has done an excellent job at packing material for all 5 tests into this one book.

This book is an excellent guide for the OCP Oracle7 DBA Exam with Oracle8 upgrade, and I highly recommend it. As far as I know, no better book for the OCP exam exists. I honestly don't understand why some people are so unfair in their reviews of this magnificent book.The book is very well organized. Each section is dedicated to one of the required exams. The material is crisp clear and the coverage is to the point, custom made for OCP exam. I could not find another ONE book that covers as much material on Oracle. The errors and typos are minimal and DON'T present much problem.Each chapter has a summary and a Two-Minute Drill as well as a set of challenging questions with complete and detailed answers. The Chapter Summary and the Two-minute Drill make a wonderful reading material the day before the exam.The book comes with a CD-ROM containing an electronic version of the book and a test software that resembles the real exam with a set of sample questions.The book will need updating for the OCP for Oracle8 DBA which is now offered by Oracle (or soon to be offered). Networking needs to be completely revised for Oracle8. Command line managers such as Namesctl80, Lisnrctl80, SVRMGR30, and National Language Support need more coverage.The chapter on Tuning Memory Utilization needs slight modifications. The author uses the term "hit ratio" when he means "miss ratio". In many cases, the meaning is clear to the attentive reader and the negative logic is carried uniformly for the majority of cases, even in the chapter questions. I believe this is probably what confused a small number of readers. There is one case in particular where even the author confuses the semantics of the ratios (in the lower half of page 875 and the top of page 876) and unfortunately, to make this particular ONE example hard to figure, the given SQL-Plus select statement to compute the "MISS RATIO" does not work. One or two non-working code fragments in 1256 page book is insignificant by any standard.To sum up. I highly recommend this book for those who need to prepare for the OCP exam.Shakib Misherghi, Ph.D. [email protected](NOSPAM)