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Enthuware examens with old JDBC questions?

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Hello everybody,

I found some questions related to JDBC in enthuware exams that I guess they are not in the examen's scope anymore (SE 8):

- con.setAutoCommit(false)
- prepared statements
- callable statements
- ResultSetMetaData

does anybody who has taken the exam lately ran into this kind of questions or something that shouldn't be in the scope?
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Autocommit is on the exam. In fact, we wrote a blog entry on the topic because we neglected to cover the topic in our books (Sybex).

The other topics are not on the OCP 8 exam but were on the OCP 7 exam. I'm sad. I wish they kept PreparedStatements in scope as that's what developers should be using if writing raw JDBC!
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This is a problem for us also. We have received reports from test takers that they got questions on these topics in the exam. It is very difficult to convince users that they need to go through these. Official exam objectives are not always detailed or exhaustive. Sometimes they just mention a class and not its methods (eg. StringBuilder).

In case of JDBC, they have mentioned, "Describe the interfaces that make up the core of the JDBC API including the Driver, Connection, Statement, and ResultSet interfaces and their relationship to provider implementations." Is this list supposed to be exhaustive? Isn't RSMD a core interface?  They didn't mention this interface explicitly in OCP 7 objectives either but there were questions on it in 7 also.

Had they meant only those 4 interfaces, they could have made it clear. Something like "Describe Driver, Connection, Statement, and ResultSet interfaces and their relationship to provider implementations.".

HTH,
Paul.
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Paul Anilprem wrote: They didn't mention this interface explicitly in OCP 7 objectives either but there were questions on it in 7 also.


The OCP 7 objectives state "Create and use PreparedStatement and CallableStatement objects". The OCP 8 objectives do not. This part at least is clear!

I've heard reports (including my own) where the exam matched the stated objectives quite well. Especially in the space of PreparedStatements/CallableStatements not being on it.

What makes this hard is Oracle includes experimental questions. So just because someone saw a question doesn't mean that it doesn't count. Or that they remembered it right.

Also, sometimes Oracle includes questions on other interfaces when testing syntax rather than API use.

Anyway, I stand my ground on these three interfaces not being on the exam. That said, you should definitely learn about PreparedStatements for real life coding!
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I do wonder if some of the users Paul heard from confused the 7 and 8 exams, or didn't remember the material accurately.  After all, the test is hard and it's easy to be overwhelmed. It's highly unlikely when Oracle explicitly removes an objective from an exam, like the removal of the PreparedStatement from 7 to 8, for it to then appear on the exam.  We certainly haven't heard any such feedback from any of our readers.

While the depth of an Oracle objective may be subjective, the existence of it is usually not.  For example, if StringBuilder is in an objective, then you need to know about it, but which methods in particular requires an element of common sense.  Sure, you can study every single method in the API, but given the broad scope of the OCP exam, that's bound to be exhausting.  In our books, we focused on the most reasonable requirements, while also incorporating suggestions from our readers including our own experiences taking the exams.

Likewise, if Oracle drops Callable statements or ResultSetMetaData as objectives, then you can sleep well in knowing you don't have study for it.  Not that these aren't important topics, but as I said, the scope is broad so you're better off focusing on what you know is on the exam.
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Good to know, thank you all for your answers.
I will take a look to the autocommit stuff asap. Any other topic that I should know before facing the exam but it's not in your book?

Thanks a million!
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No, but there were more questions on JDBC driver versions, result set scrolling, and result set modes than I have ever used in real life.  Make sure you know tables 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 from our book!
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