Cheapest way to prepare for oracle 9i DBA

[Want2BADBA]

I am familiar with SQl and now planning to take the Oracle 9i DBA certification exam. I do not come from a very technical back ground but I understand RDBMS and want to get certified by June-July 03. So can some of you please suggest the following (free or economical)
1. Computer based training (CBT) for learning. If anyone has used NETg or Smartforce.com products, please comment.
2. Books for certification which really do the job of coverning material in depth and easy to understand.
3. Any other place to get free or good test material for practice.
4. Is there a study group in Atlanta, GA that I could get involved with.
Thank you in advance regards

 

[davesaint]

http://www.dbdomain.com/dba_info.htm

Want2BADBA,

You may want to click on the above link and check out this training provider. I just signed up for $349 and have access to both the OCP DBA and developer courses for 1 year. Certification practice exam costs $49 per per exam. They raised the price of these tracks to $469 today. They were running a special and I received the $349 price. I was told by this company that in order to receive your certification in 9i that you have to take at least one course at Oracle. But if you are certified already in 8.i you do not have to meet this requirement. A representative from Smartforce contacted me today about their online training. The Microsoft classes looked good but I do not know about the Oracle clases. Below is a statement about the Oracle training (in the link above) that may be of interest to you. Please let me know what you think once you visit their web site?

Forget other vendors' training courses, which only provide a SQL*Plus interface, a database "simulator", or other such nonsense. No other self-study Oracle training vendor provides you with hands-on practice working with a live database. Our hands-on courses are designed to gain maximum retention of the technology subjects, get hands-on experience working with a live copy of the Oracle database, and understand how to work with the Oracle database on different operating systems (including Microsoft Windows, Unix, and Linux).