Oracle PL/SQL Developer Certification - No Big Deal

For the last one and a half years, after joining the company I work with now , one thing was pending in my list. That was Oracle PL/SQL Developer Certification. I am working with Oracle 9i Release 2 and had a great chance to work extensively with PL/SQL and little bit of Database Management Activities. I was told long back about this certification by Mr. Arunkumar who was my mentor in the company, who also gave me insight on the DBA activities.

I had made up my mind two weeks before that I should complete my certification before December 10th. Some how I managed not to skip the deadlines this time and completed by December 6th. I gave my first Exam (1Z0-007) on December 1st and Second (1Z0-147) on December 6th. I wanted to write about this with a main objective to help those who have any plan to write this Certification. The following Steps would be more useful in reaching your target easily.

a. First and Foremost if you have been working with Oracle more than a year (Need not be full time) just go give this at the earliest, no big deal this is.
b. The basic hands on requirement to crack the exam confidently, according to my perception are the following things,

(1) Ease in creating Tables, Views, Procedures, Functions.
(2) Once in a while you should have given Grants , Created Sequences, Indexes and Synonyms
(3) Queried and seen at least once the Oracle Data Dictionary
(At least to understand what it is)
(4) Written some Queries with Joins.
(5) Tried Creating some Packaged Procedures and Functions
(Public and Private) , with a little use of Cursors.
(6) Used some basic oracle functions for computing (Like Count, Sum etc)
(7) Dabbled a little with different Triggers
(8) Knowledge of Dependencies.
(This you can get even if you have programmed in any language)
(9) Hands on with any IDE, Most Preferable will be the command line Interpreter SQL *PLUS.

The above 8 things are Minimum requirements to give the exam with full confidence. So if you have just heard of these just sit for a 10 days of preparation (After Office Hours) with the reference material I can suggest to crack this certification.

c. For the 1Z0-007 exam you can refer this SQL Fundamentals Guide.This covers all the topic for the exam. You can also refer these sample question papers to get some insights on how the questions would be. The most time consuming part to study will be Single Row Functions and Aggregate Functions. You Can rush through this topic by just skimming on the various questions. You can give this exam on-line without going to any pro-metric testing center ( You can call this Open Book :). For the test registration refer this. The Passing score is just 70% , so approximately 39 Questions should be correct out of the 52 Possible. Don't think this is some hilarious task, even I was able to clear 49 out of the 52 possible.

d. After you pass 1Z0-007 exam give the second exam in a time gap of maximum one week, so that you will not lose touch with the preparation. 1Z0-147 - deals with basics of PL/SQL, so to get good understanding about PL/SQL the rescuer is always the PL/SQL Guru. You can read one of his best books of PL/SQL by Oreilly Publication. But for the exam point of view if you want to rush through then refer this syllabus oriented book. This book may be tough for you to read , as I found ,because this was a collection of presentations, which did not give me a continuous flow like Steven Feuristein gives in his book. After attending the exam I could see everything was covered in the syllabus book, so you can have a final look before going to the exam. For 1Z0-147 you can use these model question papers to get some insight on the type of questions :). This Exam can be given at only a Prometric testing center, for locating your nearest testing center check here. The passing score for this is 77%, so approximately 51 questions should be correct out of the possible 66.

e. The total cost of the two exams will be 220 USD. A credit card can help you pay on-line as well as at the testing center.For the certification path refer this oracle education site.

Hope the above 5 points may help you in clearing this small carrier goal, if you have set this in your career path. All the Best for all those who is going to give the exams after reading this :)

Update : (29th Jan 2008)

I could see many hits for this post and some of my friedns where asking for the SQL Fundamentals Guide book also in e-book format as I have given for the 1Z0-147 exam. So you can download from here. Hope this helps all those people who reach here :)

Update : (02nd Jul 2008)
I am not sure whether this is the best post I have written as I am seeing the highest traffic only for this post. If you find this useful please leave a comment on how useful it was so that I can improve in my future post.