December | 2011 | The Transcender Team Weblog

Become an Oracle SQL Certified Expert

Have you taken a look at the Expert series of certifications that Oracle offers? Normally, the path to an Expert certification is shorter than the path to OCA or OCP certification, sometimes as little as a single exam, but Expert certification requires a very in-depth knowledge of a particular area of Oracle technology.

If you are an Application Developer or a DBA who uses SQL extensively, you may want to consider the Oracle Database: SQL Certified Expert certification. The only requirement is to receive a passing grade (66% or higher) on Oracle’s certification exam 1Z0-047. However, before you jump to sign up, you need to be warned. This exam is not for your casual user of SQL. It requires an in-depth knowledge of SQL, including all of the enhancements made over recent years. Furthermore, this is one exam where Oracle University does not offer a course which maps almost perfectly to the exam.

The course “Oracle Database 11g: Introduction to SQL” or the equivalent knowledge would be a helpful resource, but you need to look closely at the topics covered. Here are my observations:

Be prepared to write joins using the new ANSI standards. You’ll also need to write single row, multiple row, and correlated subqueries.
All of the set operators are covered, as well as the new MERGE command and the multi-table INSERT command.
You should be well versed in index creation, and the various type of indexes, and more importantly when it’s appropriate to use each kind of index.
Understanding privileges, both object and system, as well as roles (both default and non-default) should be in your repetoire. You should also be prepared to answer questions dealing with transaction control, external tables, and the use of the Data Dictionary.
Constraints are hit hard, and the multidimensional report writing commands of ROLLUP, CUBE, and GROUPING are covered on the exam.
You should be able to deal with all the date and time functions, and provide global support to clients in different time zones.
The Oracle propietary commands to produce hierarchical tree-structured reports are definitely covered in the exam objectives.
And finally, be prepared to deal with regular expressions and pattern matching using the various REGEXP functions. Perl programming experience would come in handy here.

If you decide to take on this challenge, we have just finished upgrading the Transcender 1z0-047 exam prep practice test to 11g Release 2. This practice test will give you a good idea of what you are in for when you go to take the Oracle exam. Just like the live exam, the questions on the practice exam are challenging and really do require you to be a “SQL Expert”.

Good luck to all!

The Oracle Guy

What happened to my information super highway?

December 27, 2011 at 9:18 am | Posted in Transcender news | Leave a comment
Tags: AT&T, Charlotte, crisis, iPad, iPhone, NC, Netflix, piano cat

When I was a kid, the interstate that traveled through downtown Atlanta called the “connector” had only three lanes in each direction. The Department of Transportation (DOT) spent years expanding it. When I graduated college it had so many lanes that traffic was not going to be a problem. I moved away to Charlotte and came back a few years later. All the lanes that were added to the downtown connector did not matter. There were too many cars and not enough lanes. The same problem is happening with our wireless networks.

The Internet was called the informational super highway. This new highway could educate millions all you needed was modem. The modem went by the way side a long time ago because we needed more bandwidth for downloading and watching video. Now we can surf the Internet with our wireless networks and those airwaves are getting very crowded. If you thought that the problem was caused by people looking a Piano cat videos on YouTube, think again. Now with the surge in smart phones and other mobile devices the crunch on Internet bandwidth is greater than ever before. Those cool iPhones consume 24 times as much data as traditional cell phones. Tablets like the iPad consume 122 times more data than a traditional cell phone. As more people use smart phones and tablets, there will be a 35 fold increase in mobile traffic. The experts say that we will run out of bandwidth in a few years. Can anything be done to stop this catastrophe?

The spectrum is getting thin. Spectrum is used to refer to public airwaves that radios, broadcast television and mobile phones use. These airwaves are overseen by the federal government. Since the public airwaves are getting thin, the Obama administration wants to double the space that serves broadcasters and cell phones in the next decade. Federal government use 18% of all bandwidth in the US exclusively and shares 52% of the US bandwidth with the private sector. 6% of the all bandwidth in the US is for TV broadcasters. The government would like to take back some of the bandwidth spectrum and auction it off and give the current spectrum holders a cut of the profits. The General Accounting Office said that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) the agency that oversees the 60+ federal agencies does not know which agencies are fully using or under utilizing their allocated bandwidth spectrum. It could take the government years to reallocate their bandwidth spectrum. Each of the 60+ agencies is probably not going give up their bandwidth spectrum allocation without a fight, because they may feel that they want to use that bandwidth one day. Some private companies such as TV broadcasters may have some of the bandwidth spectrum but are not fully using it. However, private companies are not going to want to hand back precious bandwidth spectrum to the government. This is America, no one wants to hand back to the government something so the government can re-allocated it out.

Once there was a world with plentiful and low cost bandwidth, those days are coming to an end. Several providers are moving to bandwidth caps on their service. AT&T recently imposed a 250GB data cap for users of its DSL service. What does this do to my Netflix account? Well if you want to watch a lot of HD movies in 1080p, you will probably hit that cap. AT&T will sell you additional bandwidth at a nice premium. This will take a bigger bite out of your wallet. Seven years ago, people who were illegally downloading stuff might reach that 250 GB cap. Now you could probably reach that cap while watching a lot of movies on Netflix. Yikes!

The law of supply and demand has kicked in. Now that bandwidth has become a precious commodity, the provider can ration it and charge more for it. Will the bandwidth run out? No, but it is going to cost you. Will the bandwidth crisis affect the economy? More than likely because it will limit communication and therefore limit growth. I hope that we will not see government campaigns for rationing.

I so love to look at dancing cat videos on my phone.

Microsoft Office 2010 (MOS): practice products for Core and Expert certifications

December 13, 2011 at 9:20 am | Posted in Microsoft, Transcender news | Leave a comment
Tags: MOS, Office 2010

Transcender has partnered with G*Metrix, a technology testing provider, to offer you the Microsoft Office 2010 practice test products! Those who are familiar with our Office 2003 and Office XP products will find the same ease of grading and remediation text in the G*Metrix products. The Microsoft Word and Excel practice tests will also include a third pool of Transcender’s practice questions and corresponding explanations.

Users can choose from testing mode or training mode.

In either mode, the format and appearance of the test engine mirrors a live exam. The task(s) to be solved for each item appear(s) at the bottom of the screen below a fully enabled version of the Office 2010 product being tested. In training mode only, users can click the question mark at the lower right-hand corner of the screen and pull up a full tutorial that explains each step of the action to take to complete the task.

The practice test application is available as a download that installs on your computer. Because this simulates a live-in-the-application test, you must also have your own copy of Office 2010 installed to run the exam.

For more information on passing your Office 2010 exams, check out our earlier blog posts:

http://transcender.wordpress.com/2010/08/26/taking-the-office-2010-exams-the-rolling-stone-gathers-the-mos/

http://transcender.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/office-2010-mos-study-tips-tricks/