This book has a fairly decent walk through of the exam. The 'substance' is there but the proofreading is not. Many times this can be inferred - for example; on page 175 - it tells you to set the 'processes' parameter in the 'static' parameter file by using the 'scope=spfile' option.

alter system set processes=200 scope=spfile;

Okay - so far so good. Next page - we set the optimizer mode to the outdated 'rule' value. However - we want the change to work for the current session only - so we use the 'scope=spfile' value. (HUH??)

alter system set optimizer_mode=rule scope=spfile;

This is straight out of the book. It was obviously a mistake because they said the same value for scope did two different things. I looked it up the 'alter system' command on the net and found the correct scope value to affect only the current session is 'memory' - so it should actually have been:

alter system set optimizer_mode=rule scope=memory;

Makes much more sense now. The thing that kinda scares me is how many more of these little mistakes are there that are not as obvious? So I try to read this book as a 'rough in' but take it all with a grain of salt.

I don't know how many good books there are out there yet for the 11g exam - this one is OKAY. I bought this one impulsively at B&N without prior research... maybe you can find a better one.

One more thing - if you are not yet familiar with the fundamentals of a relational database (normalization, foreign keys, join types, etc.) - do NOT go off of the explanation in the beginning 'primer' chapter of this book - it is horrible and I was only able to piece it together using my prior knowledge of the same. Once it gets into the actual DBA work the writing improves.

Edit 9/10/2008 - Now that I'm further into the book I'm going to have to say; don't get this book - it's too inaccurate. Here's another example - one of their sample exam questions asks for modifiers that can be applied to a b-tree index and not a bitmap index. One of the WRONG answers was "descending". To quote: "Descending, function-based, and compound indexes can be either b*tree or bitmap.

It seemed really odd to me that you could make a bitmap index descending. So I looked it up the CREATE INDEX statement on oracle docs 11g:

ASC | DESC
(...)
Restriction on Ascending and Descending Indexes You cannot specify either of these clauses for a domain index. You cannot specify DESC for a reverse index. ****Oracle Database ignores DESC if index is bitmapped**** or if the (...)

This book has a fairly decent walk through of the exam. The 'substance' is there but the proofreading is not. Many times this can be inferred - for example; on page 175 - it tells you to set the 'processes' parameter in the 'static' parameter file by using the 'scope=spfile' option.

alter system set processes=200 scope=spfile;

Okay - so far so good. Next page - we set the optimizer mode to the outdated 'rule' value. However - we want the change to work for the current session only - so we use the 'scope=spfile' value. (HUH??)

alter system set optimizer_mode=rule scope=spfile;

This is straight out of the book. It was obviously a mistake because they said the same value for scope did two different things. I looked it up the 'alter system' command on the net and found the correct scope value to affect only the current session is 'memory' - so it should actually have been:

alter system set optimizer_mode=rule scope=memory;

Makes much more sense now. The thing that kinda scares me is how many more of these little mistakes are there that are not as obvious? So I try to read this book as a 'rough in' but take it all with a grain of salt.

I don't know how many good books there are out there yet for the 11g exam - this one is OKAY. I bought this one impulsively at B&N without prior research... maybe you can find a better one.

One more thing - if you are not yet familiar with the fundamentals of a relational database (normalization, foreign keys, join types, etc.) - do NOT go off of the explanation in the beginning 'primer' chapter of this book - it is horrible and I was only able to piece it together using my prior knowledge of the same. Once it gets into the actual DBA work the writing improves.