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Oracle Database Certifications Are No Longer Permanent
jfruh writes: It used to be that you could get an Oracle database certification and declare yourself Oracle-certified for the rest of your career. That time is now over, causing a certain amount of consternation among DBAs. On the one hand, it makes sense that someone who's only been certified on a decade-old version of the product should need to prove they've updated their skills. On the other, Oracle charges for certification and will definitely profit from this shift."
Clearly you don't know Oracle. The cost has always been your soul.
Yeah, but to be fair experience on a CV usually equates to number of years a person has been able to bullshit through their previous job.
Frankly almost everyone is fairly dull - if you think you're the exception, you're probably even less talented than those around you - and the majority misrepresent themselves, whether because they're outright liars or because they have an inflated sense of their ability and/or contribution to previous projects.
And, yeah, I'm in HR. I value long probationary periods - paid, of course, but at a lower rate while training is provided: IOW I care more about your reasoning skills than buzzwords on your resume. This also means that I do respect a background which implies eclectic skillset, though don't expect me to look for what you think fits best: if you're a self-taught programmer who demonstrates an understanding of the fundamentals of computer science, but your academic background is in World History, my interest will be very clearly piqued. If you're a seasoned systems software engineer whose background is entirely in software engineering, my first question will be: what that is new can you bring to us?
I especially value good ethics - this one's underrated by many companies, and sometimes one has to be careful not to be seen by some convoluted reasoning as discriminatory, but in brief: if you're here to make a quick buck and leave, or to use your colleagues as stepping stones, I'll try damn hard to make sure you're never hired, or quickly removed. (OTOH, if you're willing to work your ass off, expect to be rewarded not just in cash but in job security: employees gradually gain a share of the business with years worked, and are sufficiently involved in various policies that laying off for short-term profiteering would never happen unless the employees suddenly decide to majority vote against their own interest.)
A certification doesn't make you a good DBA. It only tells the employer that you have understood some basics.
A good DBA is able to see what the best solution is for the company and the product it delivers. It's way more important to understand the demands the product have on the database than anything else.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I agree with you when it comes to third party certification courses, but not when its the company certifying you in its own products - they have a vested PR interest to not endorse people who can't do the job.
You don't work with Oracle do you?
Their primary marketing slogan is: "Shut the fuck up and give us your money"
Oracle is becoming increasingly irrelevant....
I snuck PostgreSQL into the organization in 2005 to handle certain Web activity. It worked great for years, and my boss later decided to use it for other projects that were slated to use Oracle. All of those projects were so maintenance free at the database end that we later decided to replace Oracle with PostgreSQL for all of our database needs.
We found that the Oracle "features" we paid for failed when they were needed most, and therefore didn't work as advertised. PostgreSQL's replication and standby features would have been good enough.
I use PostgreSQL for all of my low end needs, too. I tried MySQL off and on for years, and it is still a terrible database (alter the data to fit the contraints!) when data are important. Even more exciting, though, is that PostgreSQL is slowly adding high-end features into its core infrastructure. And those features adhere to the PostgreSQL ACID philosophy.
On the other, Oracle charges for certification and will definitely profit from this shift.
I had to re-read that sentence - the first time I didn't notice the 'f' in 'shift' and thought the summary was unusually direct.
It doesn't work like that. You would still have your certification. But it would be the old certification. What Oracle will do is issue their new improved updated latest whizbang certification 2.0.
So you would have your DBA certification, and it would still be exactly what it always was, but you would not have the DBA 2.0 certification.
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