Oracle 1Z0-050: Upgrading Your Oracle 10G DBA Certification to 11G

1Z0-050: Oracle Database 11g: New Features for Administrators is the upgrade exam that will allow Oracle professionals who hold the 10g Oracle Certified Professional administrator certification to upgrade their credentials to 11G. Studying for and passing the new features exam will help to maintain your awareness of the capabilities in the current Oracle release. In the Information Technology field, if you are not keeping your skills and knowledge current, then they (and you) are gradually becoming obsolete.

The only target audience for this exam is Oracle 10G certified DBAs.  The exam provides no certification benefit for anyone else. The topics on the exam cover an extremely broad range of subject matter.  The sole factor that they all have in common is that they involve capabilities that were introduced or enhanced with Oracle 11G.

The areas that upgrade exams include are generally all over the map, and Pass4sure 1Z0-050 is no exception. Some of the highlights include enhancements in the following areas

•  Automatic Storage Management
•  Infrastructure automation
•  Database Performance
•  RMAN 
•  Flashback Data Archive
•  Problem Diagnosis 
•  Database Replay 
•  Data Recovery Advisor
•  Security 
•  Oracle SecureFiles 
•  SQL Performance Analyzer 
•  SQL Plan Management 
•  Automatic SQL Tuning 
•  SQL Access Advisor 

f you normally study for Oracle exams using the documentation, a major factor in preparing for this exam will be how dispersed the information is.  Instead of the information being located in three to five Oracle manuals, for this exam it is spread through more than ten. The data is still available, but you may spend a bit more time searching for it.  Be sure to take good notes when you are studying so that you don’t have to locate any of the information more than once.

Because the scope of subjects included on the test is so broad, the depth to which any given one is tested is fairly shallow. You are not going to be required to know the complete process for implementing a feature that has sixteen steps and requires a dozen commands.  Rather the exam will verify that you know what the feature is and possibly the basics of how it works.  The majority of questions can be classed in one of the following categories:

•     Knowing the capabilities that have been added in 11G.
•     Unusual or important upgrade steps related to moving to 11G.
•     Changes to administration tasks due to new features.
•     The basics of enabling, disabling, or configuring features.

I have never found upgrade exams to be particularly difficult and 1Z0-050 was no exception.  Preparing for it is a matter of reading up on the various new features until I understand what each does and how.  There are a number of new commands, clauses, and keywords to memorize.  It is unfortunate that on this, as with most upgrade exams, I don’t really care about eighty percent of the new features.

 However, the other twenty percent have definitely been useful and justified the time spent studying the material. I have not yet found an upgrade exam that did not include a handful of features that really helped me in my work.

Grab the topic list for this exam from the Oracle Education site.  Use the list to locate the relevant material for the new features in the Oracle documentation. There are also a number of articles on 11G’s new features on several websites.  A list of links is available in the exam detail page for 1Z0-050 on the website listed in the Author’s box below.  Study until you are comfortable with all of the topics and you should be able to pass this. Good luck on the exam.