Oracle Knowledge Areas

It is important to realize that the OCP program is constantly evolving, and the test questions are constantly being refined to reflect changes in technology and the goals of the marketplace. The most popular OCP certification is the Database Administrator program, but the application-developer program has also become very popular. In addition, the new Oracle designer certification promises to be quite popular among systems analysts.
The OCP DBA certification program consists of several tests, described on Oracle's education Web site. The duration of all of the OCP tests is 105 minutes. This includes 15 minutes for an optional tutorial and to answer survey questions at the end of the exam. Most candidates report that this is enough time to answer all of the questions. In the next lesson, we'll take a look at the kinds of questions you can expect to encounter on the exam.

SQL tuning is the process of improving the performance of SQL statements. This can involve improving the speed at which they run, or reducing the resources (such as CPU or memory) that they consume. There are several approaches that can be taken to tune SQL statements, including:

1. Indexing: Adding indexes to tables can improve the performance of SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements by enabling faster data retrieval.
2. Rewriting the query: Sometimes, simply rewriting a query can improve its performance. For example, using a more efficient JOIN type, or reordering the clauses in the query can make a big difference.
3. Optimizing data access: The way that data is accessed can have a big impact on performance. For example, using a covering index can allow a query to be satisfied entirely from the index, without the need to access the underlying table data.
4. Optimizing the database design: The way that data is organized in the database can also affect performance. For example, using partitioning can allow certain queries to be directed to a smaller subset of data, which can improve performance.
5. Using database hints: Database hints can be used to give the database server specific instructions on how to execute a query. This can be useful in cases where the database's automatic optimization is not sufficient.
6. Hardware and configuration optimization: Sometimes, the performance of SQL statements can be improved by optimizing the hardware and configuration of the database server. This might involve using faster CPUs, more memory, or faster storage.