Re: Oracle Training for a Novice - looking for recommendations
- From: Guillermo Alan Bort <cicciuxdba@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: sjwales@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2012 20:23:18 -0300
Training a newbie DBA is one of my favorite tasks :-P
My approach to these situations is first to make sure he has enough time to
actually learn anything. Then I start by giving him my OU 9i Oracle Admin
Workshop 1 books. Now, I have nothing against GUI, OEM is a pretty good
tool for a lot of things, so is TOAD... but I've often found Sr. DBAs that
claimed they couldn't do something because TOAD was broken or OEM was down.
The 9i books do a good enough job of explaining core concepts.
After that I book a meeting two to six hours a week (depending on workload)
and dedicate that time to explain the new DBA either core concepts,
site-specific stuff (like RAC, DG, etc) or explain in deep detail the
architecture and layout of the specific site. Then comes my favorite
talk... I know some people find it boring, but some actually find it
engaging. It's basically a walk by the whole process that is involved in a
transaction. There was a very good slide about it in the 10g workshop 2 or
the 10g Performance Tuning course. I try to make this as interactive as
possible, as he's already supposed to have read about it.
The rest of the time during the first few months I start assigning simple
tasks (as simple as possible) to him. First with the strict instruction of
showing me what he's going to do beforehand if it's not a dev environment.
I will often times assing a low priority research task, like a Metric
Collection Error in an dev OEM Agent. It's a good way to get him to start
familiarizing himself with the inner workings of Oracle and Metalink.
Finally, I usually encourage him to deploy a couple of VMs, and install
both OS and Oracle, deploy RAC and DG until he can do it without much
thought. It's also a wonderful place to test stuff before going to actual
functioning databases.
I've used this same method with 5 different people. So far it's worked, but
it depends on how curious the new dba is.
I know this is a lot of work, but in the long run I think it's been worth
the effort.
Aaaand, if all that was unhelpful, you may want to consider recommending
the Official Oracle courses... they are not cheap, but they are usually
good. at least the core admin ones.
hth
Alan.-
On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 6:51 PM, Steve Wales <sjwales@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm the sole DBA at my shop. This means that I'm pretty much always on
> call
> - on vacations and what not.
>
> My boss wants to get me a backup and has someone willing to start heading
> down the DBA track.
>
> Wondering if anyone has any particular recommendations on either books or
> classes to introduce someone to Oracle and get them started on the path.
>
> When I was starting out I read a couple of books to get me started - there
> was a series of books from Oracle Press as I recalled in the "101" series -
> Oracle DBA 101, Backup 101, Performance Tuning 101 etc that were published
> in 2002. This got me some good early information.
>
> So, basically looking for people's opinions on some later books (more
> relevant to 11g) and what the offerings from Oracle University (or other
> training companies) are like in order to get someone started down the path
> of DBA-dom.
>
> Thanks for any input
>
> Steve
>
> --
> //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>
>
>
--
//www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
Other related posts:
