I am Oracle Database 11g Administrator Certified Master

It has been quiet on my blog lately, because for the last four months or so I was preparing for Oracle 11g OCM exam. I have received the good news yesterday (much more quicker than I expected this to happen) that I have passed the practicum successfully. I am very happy with such result as it was the most challenging goal I’ve set to myself during this year.

There are couple of good blogs from experienced OCM DBA’s with advices on how to prepare for the exam, like, for example, the latest one from Kamran Agayev. I decided to shortly come up with three things or suggestions which helped me most (but not necessarily you will consider them as best for you).

If you or your company can afford it – get a good laptop to speed up your preparations. I was able to run four machines simultaneously: Single Instance DBs machine, Grid Control machine and two machines for two-node Grid Infrastructure Cluster with RAC database on my MacBook Retina Pro (16 GB of RAM and 256 GB SSD) without any performance issues. I found this very useful because you can prepare and practise anywhere, anytime without connecting to internet, need to plug some external HDD drives, login to remote VM’s through VPN, etc.
Download Oracle Database and Enterprise Manager documentation locally on your laptop and try to attach every single topic from OCM syllabus to relevant book/chapter in docs. Revise it like a rhyme or poem until you are pretty confident with finding the required syntax in seconds.
For each of the exam topics try to seek for your best technique and fastest path – practise intensively with both GUI and CLI approaches. If you are limited on preparation time, try to give more attention for topics that you are less familiar with.

Hope it helps.