Pythian Group

A turning point in a DBA’s career is when he/she is recognized by Oracle as an elite Oracle professional. I was happily surprised to find out I became an Oracle Certified Master (OCM). I got another surprise right away, “You are the 2nd OCM at the Pythian Group”. Well, I am very happy that I have been working among brilliant people here.

Believe it or not, after I became an Oracle 10g OCM, everybody else wanted to know how to become one. Let me show you the way to become an Oracle Certified Master (OCM).

The practical way to become OCM

1) Be Oracle OCP first. If you don’t know what that is, stop here.

2) Take 2 advance trainings from Oracle University. I highly recommend RAC and SQL tuning. Taking the training, I can play with RAC at my will without any concerns. RAC in the Oracle lab doesn’t belong to any production instance, so no worries at all. Furthermore, refreshing your knowledge of tuning is always good. Your experience from work only can’t substitute as the full toolkit of Oracle — which is what you are tested on.

3) Register for the OCM test (in many cases, the test will be in another city)
It is true for all Canadians. I had to go to New York to take the test. I was told by Oracle that there is no plan to provide an OCM test site in Canada. And I met another Canadian DBA in the test, from Toronto.

4) Book plane and hotel then take 2 days to become OCM
Get a hotel close to Oracle building though it is probably expensive, let’s say CAD $200 a day without tips. Don’t get lost in train/substation during rush hour — get a hotel close enough to walk to the exam.

5) Get results in 1 month.
I got my ‘congratulations letter’ from Oracle in a month, then a T-shirt some weeks later with the OCM logo. In this step, just wait in your warm home and enjoy it.

Drop me email if you still have questions. Welcome, my DBA friend.

The Pythian Group added another feather to its cap today. Our Nicklas Westerlund passed his MySQL Cluster DBA Certification exam, making him part of an elite group of 57 MySQL Cluster Certified DBAs worldwide, and now two here at Pythian, the other being Augusto Bott. We have a wealth of hands-on experience setting up and maintaining the MySQL Cluster. Nick’s and Augusto’s certified creds make them our go-to guys for MySQL Clustering.

Congratulations, Nick!

A company has come up with a vendor-neutral database certification exam. Some are wondering how much use this will be, as it doesn’t go into vendor-specificities. Now, the specifics of how a query optimizer handles queries, how backups, restores and security are done and with MySQL specifically, how different storage engines act are very important.

Very important.

However, it’s also important to have the fundamentals. I know relational algebra and relational calculus, because I studied at Brandeis University under the tutelage of Mitch Cherniack. It was there that I grew to love databases; I blame Mitch for it all.

From CIW’s website at http://www.ciw-certified.com/exams/1d0541.asp:

This new vendor-neutral certification focuses on universal database design principles and SQL. Aimed at database programmers and administrators alike, the exam helps solve the problem of poorly designed databases and validates foundational knowledge of any database, regardless if it’s Oracle, IBM, DB2, MySQL or others.

And I can tell you that having not only gotten a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, but having gotten a Master’s degree and specialized in databases during that Master’s degree — universal database design principles *definitely* help solve the problem of poorly designed databases. Understanding relational algebra will help you understand the foundation of SQL, and just might give you an appreciation for a declarative language.

As with all theoretical education in computer science, it might not seem to help a junior or even mid-level DBA. As a Systems Administrator, bootstrapping had very little place in my every day life, but after over 3 years of being a sysadmin, a lot of the underlying “how computers work in general” helped. Yes, I also needed to know how a particular operating system worked.

For me, it will be interesting to see if companies value a vendor-neutral database certification as they would a degree. It seems to cover the same topics, at least from my standpoint. Honestly, I think it would help programmers a lot more than it would help DBAs; at least in the MySQL world, as so many people who call themselves DBAs have very little knowledge of basic concepts — vendor-neutral *or* MySQL specific. (The blogging community aside, of course….the various blogs I’ve read from links and posts on Planet MySQL (from MySQL) and The Log Buffer (from The Pythian Group) are usually excellent and well-informed).