Skip to main content

A few thoughts about OCM 12c upgrade

Yesterday I sat for the 12c OCM upgrade exam, which I mentioned in few blog posts before. The first step after checking your ID is of course signing the NDA, and thus you won't find much real information here.

This time I chose Utrecht as the place to take the exam. Not that I have any special preference, I took each of the exams in a different place so far. The only requirements were convenient time and location defined as 'somewhere in Europe'. But in the end, Utrecht turned out to be a good place. Oracle NL headquarters are easy accessible, it's a very new building, the lunch was good:-)
And the city is nice to see.

Regarding the exam, the usual important notes still hold true:

  1. Arrive on time. It's a long day and you will have a lot of things to do.
  2. You will work hard the whole day. Get a good sleep before, be well rested.
  3. Review the exam topics well. Note that they may have change over time. There is for example an update as of January 1, 2016: Flex ASM was added.
  4. Learn how to work with the docs - with no search available. You will need the docs, nobody can remember all the syntax and all the arcane settings.
  5. Love your command line. "GUI is not available for every segment of the exam." And anyway, it's much faster to do things in sqlplus. And you will struggle for time.
Now I just have to wait for the results... And for any of you who wants to take the exam: Good luck!

Comments

Vasily said…
Hi! Did you pass?
January 12, 2016 at 3:58 PM
Vit Spinka said…
Yes, I was actually lucky enough to pass the exam.
January 12, 2016 at 4:04 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid

I was asked to analyze a situation, when an attempt to recover a 11g (standby) database resulted in bunch of "ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid" errors. I tried to reproduce the error on my test system, using different versions (EE, SE, 11.1.0.6, 11.1.0.7), but to no avail. Fortunately, I finally got to the failing system: SQL> recover standby database; ORA-00279: change 9614132 generated at 11/27/2009 17:59:06 needed for thread 1 ORA-00289: suggestion : /u01/flash_recovery_area/T1/archivelog/2009_11_27/o1_mf_1_208_%u_.arc ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid ORA-00280: change 9614132 for thread 1 is in sequence #208 Interestingly, nothing interesting is written to...
Post a Comment
Read more

Multitenant and standby: recover from subsetting

In the previous post we learnt how to exclude a PDB (or a datafile) from the standby database recovery. Of course, that might not be the real end goal. We may just want to skip it for now, but have the standby continue to be up-to-date for every other PDB, and eventually include the new PDB as well. Again, standard Oracle pre-12c DBA knowledge is helpful here. These files are just missing datafiles and thus a backup can be used to restore them. The new 12c features add some quirks to this process, but the base is just sound backup and recovery. Backup So let's start with a proper backup: rman target=/ Recovery Manager: Release 12.1.0.2.0 - Production on Mon Nov 16 12:42:38 2015 Copyright (c) 1982, 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. backup database; connected to target database: CDB2 (DBID=600824249) Starting backup at 16-NOV-15 using target database control file instead of recovery catalog allocated channel: ORA_DISK_1 channel ORA_DISK_1: SID=193...
Post a Comment
Read more

Multitenant and standby: subsetting

In the previous post we looked at managing new PDBs added to a standby database, by copying the files to the DR server, as required. However, there is another possible approach, and that is to omit the PDB from the standby configuration altogether. There are two ways of achieving this: 1. Do it the old-school way. A long time before 12c arrived on the scene one could offline a datafile on the standby database to remove it. The same trick is used in TSPITR (tablespace point-in-time recovery), so that you don't need to restore and recover the entire database if you are only after some tablespaces. 2. 12.1.0.2 adds the option to automatically exclude the PDB from standby(s). And 12.2 adds the option to be more specific in case of multiple standbys. For the sake of curiosity I started by setting standby file management to manual again. What I found is that there was very little difference, and the steps to take are exactly the same - it’s just the error message that is slightly ...
Post a Comment
Read more