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Oracle Database Certifications Are No Longer Permanent

Posted by Soulskill on from the you're-now-allowed-to-forget-things dept.

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."

3 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Not a great loss... by Jorgensen · · Score: 5, Informative

    I am an Oracle Certified DBA, and I do not consider this a great loss.

    For several reasons:

    • My (then) employer paid for the certification
    • I considered the certification test EASY. I had already been an Oracle DBA for about a year at the time (worked with Oracle products for about 5), and the test covered the stuff the manuals documented anyway. Anybody capable of digesting the Administrator's Manual should have no trouble on the test. The manuals were actually pretty good.
    • The certification is tied to the Oracle RDBMS version number. So being certified on an older version is of limited value anyway. (I know: The base RDBMS doesn't really change that much, but they wrap all sorts of nonsense around it)
    • Oracle is becoming increasingly irrelevant: MySQL (although now owned by Oracle too) takes the bottom end of the market share with ease, PostgreSQL the middle bit, and there are a lot fewer sales to be made at the high end.
    1. Re:Not a great loss... by StormReaver · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Re:Give me $5.000 by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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"