After several months delay (I suspect that my files did not make it out of Manila until after I complained about it) my Oracle Certification Program Success Kit arrived today. It includes a certificate signed by a Senior Vice President (although if Oracle is like Citibank, where apparently everyone with his own desk is called VP, that is not as impressive as it sounds), a plastic card, the right to display the OCP logo on resume and web site, and a free subscription to Oracle Magazine. Interestingly, the certificate and card are dated at May 30, 2004 and the kit has been posted in Germany, even though I am Tokyo and the sender in Edina, Minnesota.

So what is next? There are four choices for me if I want to continue collecting Oracle credentials:

• 9i is no longer the latest Oracle version. 10g was released this year, and of course, there are upgrade paths to become a 10g OCP. This will get interesting once we start migrating to 10g, but for now we are still using 9i (even for new projects).
• While the OCP is only the middle tier in the certification track (above Associate, below Master), the road to Certified Master seems to be quite long: there are no more exams, but you are expected to have several years of experience in the field, attended two advanced courses at Oracle University and you have to complete a practicum.
• Probably because of this (or maybe because certification is a lucrative business), Oracle have introduced a step in between, the OCP Special Accreditation. The first (and at the moment only) choice here is Managing Oracle on Linux, which actually makes some sense for me, as half of our Oracle installations are on Linux (the other half is on Solaris).
• I addition to Certified Professional DBA, I am also a Certified Associate Developer. The developer track also has an OCP tier, and I see myself more as a developer than a DBA, but whereas the OCA exams where about PL/SQL (very useful), the OCP exam focuses on Oracle Forms, which is a technology I have so far had no contact with. I am not even sure what it is.

But now I have to go and print name cards with the new logo.