Product Description: Four for the price of one! Oracle Database 10g OCP Certification All-in-One Exam Guide is the only book that offers thorough exam prep and a great on-the-job reference for both the latest OCA and OCP exams.
Also includes the Boson’s Oracle self-assessment engine to get experience taking the test in the environment it will be given
good book but look out for errors! 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-08 using target database control file instead of recovery catalog allocated channel: ORA_DISK_1 channel ORA_DISK_1: sid=153 devtype=DISK channel ORA_DISK_1: starting datafile copy copying current control file output filename=/u01/oracle/flash_recovery_area/ORCL/controlfile/o1_mf_TAG20080906T201002_4d5kvv6v_.ctl tag=TAG20080906T201002 recid=5 stamp=664747803 channel ORA_DISK_1: datafile copy complete, elapsed time: 00:00:01 Finished backup at 06-SEP-08
Starting Control File and SPFILE Autobackup at 06-SEP-08 piece handle=/u01/oracle/backup/cfc-1177494707-20080906-00 comment=NONE Finished Control File and SPFILE Autobackup at 06-SEP-08
so 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 only populated 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.
Long-winded PRO's: - Detailed guide covering material on OCA and OCP exams - OCA is Part 1, OCP is Part 2 of book
CON's: - Author is VERY long-winded. - Not enough use of diagrams - Not updated for Oracle 10g Release 2 (current exam topic)
If you like long, boring discussions on a topic so much that by the end of the section you forgot what the main point was, then this book is for you! However, if you like short and straight to the point, you won't get that here.
The author tends to ramble on forever on each topic. It makes reading not only boring, but confusing. Use of a few simple diagrams like those found in the Sybex books would have gone a long way. It would have clarified the point without lenghty paragraphs. I found that the author tends to repeat himself often, too.
The main problem with this style of writing is that you will miss cruicial details because they're burried deep in a sea of text. Also, you CANNOT quickly skim through the book for a brief refresher.
I would have rather seen the book written such that the main points were stated first, followed by supporting detail and a diagram or two. So, you would be able to quickly skim through the first sentence of each paragraph or so to get the gist without deep reading.
It's painful to read through this book!
Giving it 3 stars because as painful as it is to read through, I am learning from it and it will help me pass the exam. But it could have been MUCH better.
Decent guide, but don't expect it to do all the work... I recently took the Oracle 10g Administration Workshop class and purchased this book in preparation for the OCA exam. While the book itself did a great job of covering some of the basic, under-the-hood topics you need to know (not just for the test, but to be a decent DBA), it fell short in a few areas.
1. The screen shots and examples in the book aren't consistent with the latest versions of Oracle Enterprise Manager/Database Control. The version I downloaded and installed for Windows just a few weeks ago was occasionally different than the images I saw in the examples. Sometimes, the differences were minor (just a slight variation on the name of a link, for instance), but other times they were a little more severe (columns that don't appear in the version I downloaded, or functionality that seems to have been moved).
2. The last chapter in Part 1 of the book covers a topic that's an objective for the OCP test, not the OCA one (at least according to the Oracle site as of this morning). Not a big deal and it's good info to know, but if you're studying specifically for the exam you might not want to spend time on info that isn't directly relevant.
3. I could live with 1 and 2 above, but this is by far the worst part... The companion CD includes practice tests for the OCA and OCP exams, one of the main reasons I bought this book. Before I cracked open the book, I took the test labeled "OCA" to get a sort of baseline read on my current preparedness. Having taken the instructor-lead course Oracle recommends for preparation, I thought I should do reasonably well.
I scored a 23%. To make matters worse, the questions themselves were baffling, at times covering subjects I hadn't even heard of. I was completely disheartened. Did I sleep through my $3000 class, or was I just that dumb (please don't answer that)?
A couple of days later, I figured it out: the software was bunk. The tests were mislabeled (that is, the one labeled "OCA" was actually the practice test for the more advanced "OCP" certification exam and vice versa).
Furthermore, many of the questions themselves have typos. I found a few, for instance, that don't actually state the question, going right from the background info to the possible answers. You'd get a "question" that looked like this:
Jill has four bananas. Mike has three apples.
A) Monkey. B) Six. C) Spaghetti. D) None of the above.
Or, in at least one case, a question that told you what the actual answer was before giving you the choices:
What's 4+2?
B is the correct answer. 4+2 equals 6.
A) 3 B) 6 C) 18 D) Pi
One last beef with the included practice tests... After completing the test, you're given the option of reading a review of the questions you missed. Great feature that all practice test software should give you. While reviewing your misses, though, there's an utterly useless "References" portion that always just refers you back to the text. Doesn't tell you which page to look at for more info, or even which chapter. Just ever-so-helpfully tells you that there's more info on that question SOMEWHERE in the book. Thanks for nothing.
Clearly, more of my problems were with the companion CD than with the book itself. If I reviewed only the text on its own merits, I'd probably give it 4 stars instead of just three. Likewise, the CD would only get 2 on its own.
Again, though, it's imperative that you don't rely solely on this text for the exam (or for learning the software itself, for that matter). Download it and install it, get familiar with EM as it is now. Look on the Oracle site to find out whether or not the exam topics have changed. And, if you can afford it (or sweet talk your employer into it), take an instructor-lead class. It's a requirement for the OCP cert, anyway.
Oh, and in case you wanted to know... I took the test yesterday and did, indeed, pass.
Good coaching. I passed OCA exam thanks to this book and with a little help of SelfTest software. Very good writing. Authors definitely know the subject practically. It is a good reading on Oracle RDBMS internals. And more entertaining than the Oracle Concepts Guide. Again - their writing style is excellent, they do not over-complicate things and manage to explain complicated subjects simply and clearly. I wish they wrote something on efficient oracle design :).
Good OCP guide This book is very good not just for clearing OCP but also reference for novice as well as experienced DBAs . The authors have covered the exam syllabus very concisely without leaving anything yet keeping the volume to a minimum . However for the part 2 exam , one might have to read oracle manuals thoroughly especially for resource management and scheduler concepts . The pratice test CD that comes with the book is very helpful.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
