Customer Reviews

OCA Oracle Database 11g SQL Fundamentals I Exam Guide: Exam 1Z0-051 (Oracle Press)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The Oracle SQL Certified Expert exam covers several topics that are not covered in books that are geared towards the SQL Fundamentals exam. It is for that reason that I purchased this book to use as a study guide for the Oracle SQL Certified Expert exam. I recently passed the exam and give full credit to the time I spent going through this book and taking the practice tests.

The books assumes a little knowledge of SQL but I think it is a great guide for both beginners, and experts alike. It is well organized and has a great index. You can read it from beginning to end and it makes logical sense, or you can simply use it as a reference to look up the portions you are interested in. Because the book is geared towards passing the exam and not simply to provide more general SQL knowledge, you won't find any examples that you work on, alongside the book, as you read. Some people might find it hard to learn that way, but for me it was great. I didn't need to have a computer in front of me to try out the code to understand what it meant. This also allowed the book to focus on some of the more subtle and conceptual aspects of the SQL language and how Oracle has implemented it. I think that is key to having passed the exam. Because the book teaches the concepts behind the SQL language, instead of just giving syntax examples, it helps you correctly answer questions that might not directly relate to examples given in the book. For example, the book has a great section on the meaning of "NULL" which is used in a lot of "trick" questions. It might not give you all possible examples of where "NULL" can be used in a question, but it does give you a good understanding of what "NULL" means in the SQL context and therefore how to answer questions that could be affected by "NULL" in their code.

My biggest gripe with the book is the fact that it only came with 70 test questions on the CD, and that the CD is Windows only. 70 questions is the equivalent to 1 practice exam. You can download an additional 70 questions from the web after registering with the publisher, but even doing that only gives you 2 practice exams worth of material. It doesn't take long to memorize all the correct answers for 140 questions. I would have preferred the book if it came with at least twice as many questions. I also think its kind of ridiculous that the CD itself is not cross platform. Such practice exams could have been developed in a way which would have allowed me to run it under Mac OS X or Linux. Instead I had to run Windows under virtualization just to take the practice exam.

This book has a lot of errors in, which I would consider to be a problem for anyone actually studying for the exam. I'd also agree that many of the topics tested on the exam are not fully covered here - I have already taken the exam, and several things were questioned that were not mentioned at all in the textbook. In addition, some of the errors were in the test questions and answers in both the book and downloaded material, which is very confusing. Overall I would say this book should only be used as a backup text to something better edited and more comprehensive.

The book is a good resource to give you a overview of features.However,it does not reflect the actual exam scenarios.Topics that appeared most in the exam are discussed in lighter vein.

I would suggest people to study the SQL programmer guide rather than exam guide.Once you are done with the detailed SQL pragramming, then you can briskly follow this one.

Gave it one star as I found SQL Programmer guide more useful than this one.This one is worth reading but not very helpful to pass the exam

I have used multiple books to prepare for the Oracle SQL Expert exam.
This particular book is unique in that it covers all the topics for the exam (including the following
topics which are hard to find in just one book):
Generating Reports by Grouping Related Data, Managing Objects with Data Dictionary Views, Regular Expression Support, and Hierarchical Retrieval, and a few sections on managing TimeZones, Flashback, and External Tables.

Although this book is comprehensive enough for the examination, I thought the topics were covered more clearly in other books - particularly Oracle SQL by Watson and Mastering oracle SQL by Mishra. If your primary goal is to pass the exam, this book is ideal. Otherwise, study from a combination of aforementioned books.

Pros:
+Covers all the topics for the SQL Expert certification.
+Accessible to someone new to Oracle.

Cons:
-The author repeats himself 3 to 4 times in each section.
-The syntax and the description are verbose ( the syntax is given with an
example query and about a page describing it which could have easily been
replaced by [ ] | etc...)
-The examples are rudimentary and extremely obvious from the discussion

Steve O'Hearn does a good job delivering a very encouraging, personal (as well as informative) tone to the material. While containing much the same material as other Oracle Press SQL books, it does not lift or "steal" any of the wording. O'Hearn has opted to write everything from scratch. The book also lacks the typographical errors that have plagued so many Oracle Press books over the years.
This book's objective is to prepare you for the exam. It is not an exhaustive SQL reference (though certainly robust) - nor does it claim to be. In addition to the book itself, you also have access to the ebook and additional exam simulated questions via the CD. The ebook is in Adobe and isn't formatted quite as well as the Kindle version. The ebook is baked into the price at nearly $40.
There really isn't too much I would offer in the area of improvements - except to have even more exam type questions.

This book is almost useless. Namely, it is riddled with errors, doesn't cover all the exam topics, examples are way to easy in comparison with the actual test and the 2 sample tests are easy too.
I just took the online exam and passed. However:
- most of the questions were about complex SQL statements, mostly joins and subqueries
- the online test has a serious problem: namely, the question and the proposed answers are displayed in one tab
and the table structures and tabel data are displayed in a second tab. Now the catch: the tabs can't be viewed simultaneously. This is a major problem since you have to switch back and forth between the tabs and you forget either the exhibit or the question and the given answers.

I easily scored over 95% on the practice tests (from this book and other sample tests) and barely got 75% on the real test. On a final note, I do have several years of hands-on SQL experience.

As someone who has been working with Oracle for years, I was pretty confident about my SQL knowledge but I decided to buy this book anyway in order to fill some small gaps that I noticed when I checked the topics covered in the exam. I am glad that I did, because the gaps were a little bit bigger than I thought and some of the topics I was feeling very confident about needed some polishing.

As I am used to working with strict naming conventions, a basic question such as whether or not is possible to give the very same name to a table, an index or a constraint never occurred to me before (the answer is yes, as they belong to different namespaces). I also thought that I knew perfectly well everything related to joins but I found little surprises such as a predefined keyword for the Cartesian product (CROSS JOIN) or that a column of datatype TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE can be used as a PK but a column of datatype TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE cannot.

The book is well organized and it covers point by point the objectives of the Oracle exam. The examples are well chosen (no need to be in front of your computer) and the way the author explains each topic is so clear that the book could also be used by a beginner as a learning tool. I could only spot a small typo (SEELCT instead of SELECT on page 521) and probably one of the questions on a self test about the use of a pseudocolumn on page 163 that could have been improved a little bit:

SELECT ROWNUM, *
FROM PORTS
ORDER BY PORT_NAME;

It fails with a syntax error but the author didn't mention that it can be solved by using an alias:

SELECT ROWNUM, p.*
FROM PORTS p
ORDER BY PORT_NAME;

But these are really unimportant details. If you have not taken any Oracle exam yet, the one provided with the book will give you a very good idea about what to expect, but be warned that questions in the exam are a little bit harder. For me, this book was a key element for passing the exam and I can surely recommend it.

I purchased this book in preparation for the Oracle Database 11g SQL Fundamentals 1 Exam. While the breadth of the material is good as it covers every topic on the exam, the presented examples are extremely simplified and often present a concept in its most basic form. In addition, the exercise questions at the end of each chapter are much too simplified. I downloaded a practice exam from Transcender and was amazed at the difference in complexity between the questions and exams provided by the book and those from Transcender. If you are taking the exam, the questions in the book as well as the exams will not fully prepare you for the exam. I highly recommend purchasing additional practice exams from Transcender; they have the look and feel of actual Oracle exam questions. I did find the study text in this book extremely useful and would recommend it in conjunction with some other study aid.

The book is well-written and O'Hearn does an excellent job of explaining the material. The problem with this book is that the code references a schema that is non-existent. Instead of using the excellent test schemas that Oracle provides with its database software, O'Hearn uses examples from a schema that he neither supplies on the included CD or makes available on the Oracle Press website. Why was this done? This book could have been excellent except for this glaring omission. If he was going to use a schema that Oracle did not provide with their software, why not supply it with the book? It must exist since he uses it for the examples he gives in the book. The book is excellent and I am using it along with SelfTest software to study for the 1Z0-047 test, but it is disappointing not to have the source for the examples used in the book to practice with. I'll update this after I take the test in a few weeks with the outcome.

Not to nitpick but this book has at least one error in it. I will add others as I find them. On page 217, the author states that the RPAD function pads a character string with x number occurrences of a string. In reality, RPAD pads the character string until the string length reaches x number of characters. For example, (using his example):

SELECT RPAD('Chapter One - I Am Born',40,'.') FROM DUAL will result in a character string of Chapter One - I Am Born................. which is what he shows in the book. However, in the text, he states that the SQL will "Take a string literal 'Chapter One - I Am Born' and pad it to the right with 40 occurrences of a single period." Anyone following the text would likely miss any exam question based on his explanation.

I did not see an errata link on the Oracle Press web page for this book.

The book covers everything you need to know for the exam in a very clear and organized way. The exam covers a very broad array of subjects, so it's helpful to have a guide like this that focuses your attention on the right spots. A huge plus is that the practice test that comes with the CD is *very* faithful to the actual exam, so taking it is great practice and gives you a good idea of how well you'll do on the real thing.

The one downside is that once you're done with the exam, the book is pretty much dead weight. It's focus on only the topics covered by the exam leaves it with too many gaps (pl/sql, triggers, etc...) to really be useful as a general reference.