Oracle of Nashville

A question every Oracle DBA eventually asks themselves in their career:  should I become Oracle certified?  Also, just how valuable is a certification from Oracle? I think the answer depends.  I don't view a certification as necessary, but it may be helpful in your circumstances. I am Oracle certified and did so early on in my career.  I took some time off in between jobs and decided that was a good way to fill my time.  Also, I was already doing DBA work, but hadn't been given the job title "Oracle DBA" (one reason I left my job at that time).  For me, getting certified allowed me to show that although I hadn't obtained the title yet, I had the work experience plus the Oracle verified skill set. I think hands-on work experience trumps certification.  I don't see many DBA job postings that say a certification is a must.  In a crowded market, it may help your resume stand out though. I also would not recommend someone who hasn't bee...

Several weeks ago we had major corruption across the file-system on our production database server.  Everything was affected--Oracle home files, database files, logs...everything. After I restored the database, I used RMAN to search for corruption in the instance. RMAN> BACKUP VALIDATE CHECK LOGICAL DATABASE ARCHIVELOG ALL; This command will validate all database and archive log files that would be backed up, checking for physical and logical corruption.  No backup is actually done with the command. When corruption is found, it can be seen in  V$DATABASE_BLOCK_CORRUPTION . My output was the following: FILE# BLOCK# BLOCKS CORRUPTION_CHANGE# CORRUPTION_TYPE ---------- ---------- ---------- ------------------ ------------------------------------ 15 2061570 126 9709077348 NOLOGGING 15 2061442 126 9709084124 NOLOGGING Corruption was found, but the corruption type wasn't shown.  I also couldn't find the objects that were corrupted. SELECT owner, segment_...