Certification Practice

I plan to get Oracle certified. The first test I am going to take is SQL and PL/SQL. After going over the exam topics, I determined I was weak in a number of areas. Some of those include the ALTER TABLE command.

There were a couple good articles from a Google search on the ALTER TABLE command. I printed them out, then copied down the basics. Now it was time to put this study into practice.

At home I have an Oracle Express Edition installation. I logged in as SYSTEM. However I felt it would not be right to create tables as SYSTEM. So I created a user. In the back of my mind I knew to give that user CREATE SESSION so I could log in.

I logged in fine. Then I got an error on creating the table. This user had no permissions to create the table. So I granted the user the CREATE TABLE privilege. But I still could not create the table. I had no rights to the SYSTEM tablespace. Ooops. I changed the default tablespace for this user to the USERS tablespace. Then I granted a quote for the users on the USERS tablespace.

Now I was able to get some real practice in. I created a table. Then I renamed the table. I added some columns to the table. I proceeded to rename the columns. Then I changed the data type of some columns. Yes this is all basic stuff. However I usually let a DBA handle all this. Now I need to know what the DBA does to pass my first certification test.