I was finally at the final day of the Oracle DBA Fundamental II class. Believe it or not, I spent 2 weeks in a class learning about database and I got this feeling that (at least a tiny part of my mind was somehow sorted in rows and columns now )

What so interesting about the 2nd week of training was, I met new friends , missed few hours of the class due to problem at site (never ever show your face at the office during your training week!) and as stated in the topic Oracle making more sense to me than before.

First, I met Vernon who was from South Africa but currently found a nice place to settle down with his pregnant wife , in Perth Australia. He’s a very experienced DBA, a UNIX guy (always had this small laugh everytime the trainer mentioned about Oracle on Windows! , hey! I did too ..) and surprisingly he used to live in Malaysia for a year in early 2000. He came here in Kuala Lumpur from Australia for the training as it was cheaper to travel from his place to KL than to Canberra or Melbourne.
And also met Kim who was later discovered that she actually working on the same building as me and also was my ex-colleague when I was in IBM- No wonder she looks very familliar!

Really glad that I eventually completed the course. Perhaps it was one of the best courses that I’ve been to for years the fact that Oracle was the subject that I feared most in my life as an NMS engineer. I had at least 3-5 criticals problem involving Oracle in this 3 years time and believe me each database failure will cause a system panic not only to the NMS system but also my internal body system!

So my plan now is to install Oracle on my Centos system, play around with it and perhaps later going for OCP.
Insyaallah!

Approximately. 9 years ago I was in Helsinki attending a course on my Nokia NMS1000 Commissioning. It was tough for me the fact that I was a 2 months’ fresh graduate with minimum knowledge of UNIX (hey I know ls command!) , Oracle and the application itself.
At one stage of the installation (not easy everything was command line and source of installation was from a DAT tape!) , me and another British colleague were asked to clear some space in the filesystem and the suggestion from the trainer was to delete some “unwanted” logfiles. So what I did was running the “find / – name bla bla” command and walla! we found some log files.
I actually deleted all the redo logs from Oracle (wasn’t that genius??!) and then proudly showed it to the trainer. Her face turned red, she’s a blonde Scandinavian so it was very obvious – and that very moment I just knew that I was really screwed up . It took her perhaps half and hour to resolve the issue, made me felt very idiot that day but the cool part was somehow, after that I got more attention from her than anyone else in the class.
And now, years later I am here in Oracle Training Centre attending a course in Oracle (Fundamental DBA I & II for straight 2 weeks. What a vacation! ) . Most of the time, I will go .. Ohhh thats why in my work I have to do that bla bla command or My God! That was so easy I should have run this and that when I have this and that problem.

Hampeh kan? Come on man.. I am supposed to be a system+network engineer not a DBA!
But guess what, I already asked my superior to get me the exam voucher after the course so I can sit for the exam and become Oracle Certified Professional!