Customer Reviews

OCP: ORacle8i DBA Performance Tuning and Network Administration Study Guide (With CD-ROM)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

You can pass your exams if you rely only on this book, but you won't have a comfortable margin. The performance tuning section is the stronger of the section, and would give it 5 stars. I didn't find errors, and did pass the performance tuning exam with 58 out of 59.

The network section is why I gave the book an overall rating of three stars. There are errors (like explaining how to use connection pooling with connection concentration), typos, wrong commands, obvious -if- you knew the material. If you didn't know the material, the errors were confusing. There were also errors in the test sections. One or two errors may not seem like a big deal unless it's the difference between passing the test or not. I got the impression that the person who wrote the networking section didn't really know the nuts and bolts of networking. For networking I'd recommend The Exam Cram Book; accurate, to the point, easy to understand, written by someone who knew her stuff. I passed the networking exam, 55 out of 59, but reading the Exam Cram and reviewing the Oracle documentation would have been sufficient.

Book 5 stars. CD 1 stars. I have just finished the Net8 part of the book. I got a very good understanding of all the options. I can highly recommend the book for the text and the offline review questions. The CD is frustrating. All the answers are one question off. (i.e., on question 1 it gives the answer for question 2). When you score the exam you look like a fool. If you click on the answer button, the explanation will give you the appropriate answer.

I found this book very informative and covering almost ALL questions covered in the exam.

There are 11 Chapters in total (including additional 8i Chapter on CD) , which are all written in an easily to understand way with 20 review questions after each chapter. The topics covered in the last chapter (on CD) can be also found throughtout the relevant chapters, but it a good revision chapter on the new NET8 abilities.

There are 3 practice exams within the book and CD, I would advise only attmpting the last Practice exam (toward the end of the book) when you get close to feeling you are ready to sit the real exam. This will give you a good guide as to whether you have learnt enough about NET8.

The only negative issue I have in regard to this section of the book is that some of the revision question answers are incorrect, and can be a bit frustrating, on the upside though, if you can determine which are wrong, you must be learning something. The Bonus Exam on the CD is the worst offender, in which has all the wrong answers for the questions.. gave me a bit of a fright when I first saw my score. Also, the questions are a bit to 'theoryish', and I would've like to have seen a few more Situation questions like the real exam uses.

All-in-all though, these NET8 chapters, as well as drawing on industry experince, were the only resources I utilised on the road to completing my NET8 exam, whilst scoring 48/59.

In hindsight, these NET8 chapters deserve 4.5 stars, losing that half a star because of the error in the exam questions. Great information for any DBA though, and definatly the only one to consider when making your Oracle book purchase for OCP.

I'd like to say this book is good but not excellent. Divided into 2 parts, Performance Tuning and Network Administration. You can rely on Network Administration part to make you pass the exam without using other preparation kit. But for the Performance Tuning part, I accept that it's not quite complete. Don't be surprised if you find some questions in the exam ask about something that never stated in this book.But may be you have no choice since I've never seen Performance Tuning material that cover all of the exam ( even from Oracle Press). Anyway, you still can pass it ( like me) but not so good score.Just read it carefully

Good book for the most part but lacking in good material covering the V$ performance view and DBA static views which crop up excessively in the test especially in relation to chapters 4 - 7 (memory and I/O) tuning. A little week on the MTS views also which shocked me when I took the test.

Should use this book along with Tuning section from standard Oracle8i documentation and V$ and DBA views from Reference section also from standard Oracle8i documentation.

This book focuses on the requirements for the exam. It is also a good introduction to both Networking and Perf Tuning. Use along with Exam Cram for best results.

I passed the performance tuning exam with 48 out of 57 and studied for just 46 days. I read through this book first and then found a copy of the Instructor Lead Training (ILT) book. I found that Oracle documentation was much more difficult to read. When taking the bonus exam, manually write the answer on a piece of paper and check each answer while you are going through the test because when you click the grade button, that answer sheet is WRONG. I used this book to tune two databases at work because the material is very well presented. Regarding the exam, there were 20 very, VERY easy questions and 20 questions that were very difficult.

W. C. Feurtado, MCSE, MCDBA, and OCP-DBA wannabe (4 down, 1 to go) ...

On p. 55 the book has a review question that says: "The data store in the V$ views are generally lowercase." I find this claim to be wrong. I looked at the V$ views of our company database and I found about half of the contents are in either upper case or upper-case initialized.

I still find this book to be a valuable learning tool for DBA exams. It covers about all the basic requirements of the exams. It does not have deep ideas and reasonings, but as DBA you probably don't need too much reasoning anyway.

My advise: buy the exam cram books first. They are very good. If you still cann't do it after reading the exam cram books, then buy this book. If you have trouble with Oracle/Database concepts, then I would suggest you also buy the Jason Couchman book (Oracle8 DBA Certification Exam Guide) before you buy this book.

With 17 days of studying, I passed the network administration exam scoring 44 out of 59 questions(I thought that I would have scored better). First, I studied the Oracle8 Instructor Lead Training (ILT) course material and then studied this book making my own flashcards to help with the memorization of the material. This book was easy to understand and explained the concepts very well. When using the Self Test Software tests, this book was used as the reference because of the better explanations. The chapter tests along with the explanation of the answers helped solidify the chapter's concepts. Chapter 20, a summary of the 8i enhancements, is on the CD and was hard to read and really desired a hard copy of the text but the print button was disabled. When taking bonus exam two on the CD, write down each answer on paper and press the answer button after each question to keep a manual running score. Somehow, my test skipped question 50 and when the test was scored, it used a different set of answers. All in all, it is a very good study guide.

W. C. Feurtado, MCSE, MCDBA, and OCP-DBA wannabe (3 down, 2 to go)

I found this study guide to be exceptional. Very well written and comprehensive. The examples and figures displayed throughout the book were well done and emphasized the key concepts essential for the exam. It is obvious the authors are knowledgeable and have extensive real-life application in a variety of settings. This provides for a more practical and useful study guide. Also, since I travel extensively, I found that the Book/CD package allowed me to study anywhere.