I have been mulling over the whole value of vendor based certifications as of late such as the OCP, mcDBA and others. With the exception of the OCM "Oracle Certified Masters", my personal view is that real experience trumps any certification hands down. Alas many companies have a biased view that an OCP is more valuable than hands on experience. The only case that I would respect an OCP nowadays is IF the person has both the OCP and years of real DBA experience. Like for example, if I had to interview two candidates and one had the OCP and same experience as the other candidate then the OCP would help to be a tie-breaker. However if the candidate had superior technical experience/skills and soft skills that counts for more than an OCP in my book. One issue is that the 10g OCP only requires 2 exams to pass so it is really a more "watered" down version of the older 9i OCP program that required 4 exams to be passed for the certification. Fortunately, I am in good company with many top industry experts on the relative merit or lack thereof in terms of how valued the OCP is:
Dizwell view of OCP
Tom Kyte's view of OCP
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I really have to agree with you on this. I have a counterpart who is a Teradata certified master(I work on Teradata and I do not have any certifications). One query where a subtraction was being done was giving an error due to the resulting value being too big for the field. My counterpart gave his research findings that when a single hyphen is put it fails and when a double hyphen is put, it succeeds. A guy who does not know that a double hyphen is a comment managed to get the highest vendor certification. After this incident, I gave up all intentions of ever appearing for any certification exam in my life
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