hi all,

currently i am working on oracle collab suite 10g on RHEL4, but i always wanted to be an oracle dba. i'm thinking of getting myself certified -OCA as my first step & look for jr dba positions, but i'll still suffer from the chicken and egg syndrom.. can somebody give some advice pls. i need to figure out a way. any help/advice is much appreciated

my experience:
1. 1 yr - internal audit (no IT job but i need to eat)
2. 2 yrs - IT support (oracle 8i, e-business suite 11i - financials, purchasing, PC support. have to quit because IT dept are forced to do non-IT stuff -- there goes my dba plan
- learned sql, oracle basics, internals,backup, patching, functional here.
3. 1 month - joined a new company (linux house, open source products, oracle partner). oracle collab suite is the only oracle product they sell. joined because don't have much choice & always wanted to stick with oracle. learned installation ocs 10g, database 10g, AS architecture - all on RHEL4

am i on the right turf?

There is a lot more work for application developers and Vendor Application experts like SAP or Oracle Applications including Financials than there are DBA jobs these days.

The experience from your second position may look good to a lot of potential employers though depending on the level of detail and amount of non-IT tasks involved it may or may not have been a good learning experience.

I would stick with job 3 for a while. I suspect that many people in a hiring position would feel better about making a job offer to someone with a record of staying put for a couple of years rather than only a couple of months.

HTH -- Mark D Powell --

Andrew,

Your article is very interesting, indeed.

Nicolas.

thanks 4 all ur posting

The experience from your second position may look good to a lot of potential employers though depending on the level of detail and amount of non-IT tasks involved it may or may not have been a good learning experience
<<<

this is what I do in my previous company. there are huge amount of non-IT tasks involved i must say.. :
IT:
apps dba (support), contracts

non-IT:
secretarial jobs, purchasing executive, corporate risk management, operations etc

IT dept is rather small, only doing support. all developments are outsourced. then the mgmt sees that IT dept got nothing to do when everything is working fine. maybe these sr managers see IT is only about internet, email and repairing PC..

i really love the job, but concurrently my time was wasted on other things. i cannot claim i have extensive knowledge being apps dba. in the mean time finding jobs as apps dba / dba is hard with minimal knowledge and exp, while devoting most of my time doing those non-IT things will get me nowhere.

i would stay if i could focus being apps dba there. there are tonnes of things to be learned. but sometimes life just pushes your around.. or maybe it's just the taste of life

i'm searching & applying for jr apps dba post, even though i'm new here. not a good attitude though. currently concentrating on oracle collaboration suite, during me free time i will educate myself and prepare for certification. and hopefully will let me get what i want. this is what i'm planning rite know.

i always wanted to be successful in my career. i also have ambition like all u guys do. any opinion & suggestions are most welcome. guidance and ideas etc are very much appreciated. thanks

Yes and the rest usually come in through being a sysadmin. It is interesting that now there is a third route - application server, not least because this tool uses a database for some of its functions. AS underpins Collab Suite, so I would have thought the current position is a possible springboard into a fully-fledged DBA role.

Cheers, APC

In my case even I do that type of sysadmin tasks as well.

Amir,
Oracle Certfied

You need opportunity...

Nicolas.

Well obviously YMMV applies here. Some shops have sysadmins, DBAs, network engineers and app server guys in separate units, maybe in separate offices. At the other extreme in smaller places they all share the same pair of pants (because they are the same person, no aspersions on personal hygiene habits of admin people intended). But I have come across several places where these tech-y infrastructure roles are lumped into one unit, with at least the possibility of cross-fertilisation of experience and even job-swapping.

Managing a career transition is a tricky thing to pull off. It's relatively easy to persuade somebody to give us another job doing what we do already. It's much harder to get a job doing something different. How do we cross that gap? By impressing the manager of our current role with our talents in that role while also demonstrating an aptitude for our target role to whoever has the power to put us into that job. And if you find out how to that let me know :P

Cheers, APC