Ideally, I would have gone to the Grand Opening of the Ginza Apple Store at 10 am today, received a free commemorative T-shirt and heard a speech by Steve Jobs. Two things prevented that: the Oracle exam in the morning delayed my arrival until 1 pm, and then there was this queue in front of the shop. About halfway en route to the tail end, I met Ingo, who had volunteered to grab my T-shirt for me and after three hours in line was only two blocks (and approximately two more hours) away from the front door. He agreed to forfeit his advanced position and have lunch and videos (The Killer, Analyze That) instead. We took pictures.

After two rather high-level exams in the Oracle Developer track, my first exam in the Database Administrator track focused on all those implementation details that are required knowledge to operate an Oracle installation. And these sixty questions about the many server processes, logical and physical data structures, initialization parameters, file types and associated vocabulary covered just the topics of installing, starting and stopping the database. Setting up network connections, installing client programs or performing backup and recovery operations seems to be beyond what an Oracle Certified Associate DBA is expected to know, and is covered in a second part of this exam.