Andrei DANEASA » certification

First post on 2011

andreiash — Sat, 14 May 2011 07:22:43 +0000

The main effect Facebook and LinkedIn had on my online behavior is that I’m not posting on my blog anymore. It’s also true that I don’t have the time anymore for long articles, but I am really loving my blog (now 6 years old… school boy) and will continue to publish here things that are too technical for Facebook and not business enough for LinkedIn.

Meanwhile, since the last post, I studied a lot on Oracle Data Integrator (ran 5+ workshops across EMEA), Oracle GoldenGate (very hot on my plate, built a machine we’re using for exercises and the corresponding lab book very appreciated on our workshops), Oracle Database Firewall, got GoldenGate Certified Implementation Specialist certification, was traveling a lot to various places in Europe, including a series of 7 weeks in a row, now chilling out a bit and making time for CISSP certification.

Certification status as of May 2011

What’s common to the 3 technologies above? Anybody? Yes, I’m trying to get heterogeneous, they are all dealing with other database systems as well.

Keep in touch.

P.S. Yes, I do hate as well Ubuntu 11.04, can’t wait for 11.10

Passed Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ)

andreiash — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:02:48 +0000

I’m a constant user of Google Analytics. It’s a great piece of software with lots of useful reports, easy to read and to understand. However, I was never curious how far I can go with it.

Last week I had a discussion with someone in Oracle about Real-Time Decision (RTD) Server and Real User Experience Insight (RUEI), so I decided to find out first all the capabilities of Google Analytics.
After half of day of reading the course materials on Google Conversion University, I decided that a challenge might worth 50$, so I took the exam.

More than an hour later I passed the 70 questions exam, much difficult than I expected, with a score of 87%:

Now having the proof I understood correctly what’s happening with Google Analytics, I can jump into conclusions:

GA it’s a great piece of software for analyzing trends, keywords and content.
GA it’s staying on another server than your web server and the communication is uni-directional. This means GA will get information about your site, but you cannot implement real-time decisions based on GA
GA it’s free, same Urchin, so if you own a blog or have a small budget, these will be your choices
Both RTD Server and RUEI are licensed products with a price per processor over 80K USD, which makes them a choice just for big enterprises
RTD Server will be able to serve real-time content based on your behavior, just like Amazon is doing
GA is not able to track 404-pages, loading times, code execution times

To summarize: if you’re big, go with RTD and/or RUEI. If you’re not so big, stay with GA, Urchin or other free stuff like them.

Achieved OCP DBA certification

First post on 2011

Upgrade Oracle APEX 3.2.1 to 4.0.1 on Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (XE)

Old geek… more than 5 years of blogging

Achieved OCP DBA certification

andreiash — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 21:39:57 +0000

I never considered myself a good DBA and it’s not necessary my plan to become one. But in order to be convincing to the partners I had to take this certification.
After few months of study and exercises I took 1z0-043 (Administration II) exam on 18th of December. I passed it with 96,9% and this made me very proud.

Of course I will need to take the upgrade exam to 11g and I am pretty sure I will forget some of the things if I am not facing them on a daily basis but it was a very good lecture.
What will be the benefits? Don’t know… a diploma and a certification card for sure, 40% discount on some Oracle press books and maybe knowledge and confidence…

I’m open to share my experience with anybody interested in taking this certification