Greetings All.

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Greetings, I've just signed up to these forums, and the thing to do seems to be to write an introduction here

I recently decided to change career, having been a maths teacher for a number of years, and go into the IT industry.

After some research, I think I would be pretty well suited for database admin, so am aiming to take the MCDBA over the next year or so. My IT skills are pretty reasonable - I've built and upgraded quite a few PC's over the years, dabbled in programming, and use Ubuntu extensively. I'm currently working in an office to pay the bills, and tend to be the person people come to with their computer problems.

I've been looking at the courses offered by Advent - I know the price is pretty steep, however they offer unlimited retakes and no time limit for completion.

Does anyone have any experience with the Advent MCDBA course? And is there any other advice that anyone could give?

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Welcome to CF!

You may want to try the search feature of our site and search for 'Advent' or 'MCDBA' and see what comes up.

 

Hi there. If you maths is any good (I won't comment on the quality of some of my old teachers) development seems to be a natural path for maths graduates to take.

 

Welcome to the forum Myrrdin and good luck with your future aspirations

Delve deeply into your research of any training provider before committing yourself.

As you are a teacher, have you considered buying some decent books and teaching yourself?

Pete

 

Amen to all the above posts, but especially our erstwhile Antipodean correspondent's quoted above.

Seeing as you're a teacher, I would DEFINITELY recommend the self-study route - at least at first. You'll have the discipline necessary to give yourself a thorough grounding in DB theory prior to looking at actually studying hard for your MCDBA - maybe you'll have more luck with Boyce-Codd and UML than I did...

Coming from a maths background you'll have a pretty analytical mind, so I'd say being a DBA is an ideal choice for you. I was a DBA for eighteen months and, whilst I enjoyed it mostly, its not something I'm suited to doing full-time. Unfortunately, I expended a mahoosive amount of time and energy putting myself through the MCDBA before I decided to change career paths!

Welcome to the forums (sorry, fora - let me get my Latin pluralisms correct lest you grass me up to the English teacher!)

 

Hi there and welcome to CF

 

Thanks for the advice everyone - I will indeed check out any training providers carefully. When people talk about learning 'Database Theory', are they talking about getting a grounding in one or more of the DB languages and programs, for example teaching myself mySQL - or is this a purely logical area, akin to learning set theory as a precursor to programming?

Also, I have noticed most DBA positions require both experience and skills - could anyone suggest what sort of 'lower level' position I should be looking for once I get my MCP, in order to maximise the benefit to learning for the MCDBA?

Anyhow, I'm glad I found this site!

 

Hi and welcome to CF, Myrrdin - I'm not even going to attempt to answer the specifics of your queries, but I know there are great minds here, as you've seen already, so I know you'll get great advice in turn

Hmmm - can there be such a thing as future aspirations, Pete ?

Damn, you gotta love forum (we are one forum, comprising several separate sub-fora, or boards) politics


<Gav steps down from his pedontic podium>

 

LOL trust you to be picky - damn pedantic Armadillo