After I did my Oracle 8i Certification I currently think about an upgrade to 9i, after all I got the book for the upgrade exam for almost year at home now – periodically checking it for new features.

These 400 pages covers the one upgrade exam that will be necessary for me as an 8i DBA

But having had a job as team-leader responsible for 10 colleagues and also being on a pretty dumb project…

...with really old host technologies (databases without relations equal to fixed-size text files, old Cobol, really bad not existing "data-models" if you could call it that way if nobody in a 2000+ people organization found it worth to document it!) didn't make it easy to find the time and muse to get into practical use for all these hot new features like

• the new Log Miner features for tracking down the DDLs as well as the DMLs as well as a GUI for the Log Miner
• Row Level SCNs (System Change Numbers)
• New automatic sizing features for Undo and SGA / SQL working areas
• Multiple block-sizes within one database (hello chaos we have 9i now – hihi)
• and of course RAC - the Real Application Clusters that follow the Oracle Parallel Server and finally shall have the Cache Fusion Technology that Oracle promised me in Summer 1999 or so :-)

are sure some features you have to work with and probably have to find bugs in ? all these nice new things never work in the first releases ? so I am really wondering if the Oracle 10G announcement is the hidden message that all 9i features work as specified. Anyway, I am looking forward to starting at an Oracle Partner in 2 weeks and get back to all these nifty little bugs – and maybe a little bit less weblogging, because my university starts then, too.

If it's an Oracle certification that you are working on then you need not only to explore a book but a set or articles, links and practice tests (one CD preparing for the exam 1Z0-030 comes with my book). I now want to put together some interesting links to practice tests, books, and study guides that will help prepare you – and me – for your Oracle certification exams.

Links for now:

• Cert21 has some demos and a set of aprox. 80 questions to start with while you wait for your Oracle book
• Whizlabs offers seven test simulators for the OCP certification with a total of 610 questions
• Tons of free Oracle Training and Tutorials and even more free oracle trainging (wow – happy reading all these links)
• Examnotes Forum is a Forum for exams of all type with aprox. 3100 post in 900 threads about the Oracle Certification. Make sure to register for free there and check this forum. It also has topics like IT Jobs/Salaries, Book Reviews, IT Career women, Linux-, Cisco- and of course all on Microsoft's MCSE, MCSD, MOUS, MCAD certifications – even some SQL Server exams for MCDBA with thousands of threads to get valuable experiences from – definitely the most comprehensive source for good tips and links

If you are starting from scratch (i.e. have no previous certification) then I would recommend a full set like

with 1000+ pages this full kit will help you from scratch.

The "from-scratch" certifications even include one session in a "database problem simulator", but I cannot tell anything about that.

I do not recommend taking these drill-test without practice exams, because after all I experienced there are a lot of mechanical things asked that give you very few space for interpretation and makes it – at least for me – necessary to be drilled with practice exams (especially if your English is not so practiced, make sure you do these tests before so you don't have to worry about special vocabulary used something – I learnt some word there, too :-)

Oracle likes to hype the Oracle Certification according to the Oracle 9i Certification Candidate Guide as a "screening-tool" for filtering job-applications. Although this might be true for several companies this shall not be the only reason –

unless you have plenty time and money to complete the certs. I even heard of some dudes with a full A4 page full of certifications because they worked in a training company were they were allowed to do all these tests for free – well I guess in these things less is more.

Finally I can only recommend getting into a certification for two reasons 1) fill your knowledge gaps 2) get a great personal success that empowers you in your current and future jobs.