Today I took the Oracle AI Vector Search Professional certification and passed with a score of 80%. Passing is 68%.

Why I took this certification

When I took the Java 21 certification, Oracle was essentially using Zoom to proctor the exam. You checked in with a group, there was no whiteboard, etc. I even remarked at the time “seems like an odd security choice to have people on video without virtual background to strangers.”

I knew that Oracle had switched to a proper exam engine since that. But I wasn’t going to pay to take another exam to see it. Conveniently Oracle is running a promotion where you could take a free certification until May 15th. I looked through the list of choices to see what I found most interesting. I’ve also liked databases and vectors feature in AI so this one seemed good.

My goal was not to pass the exam. That was a happy side effect. My goal was to learn a little and then see the new engine. And the vector database learning path was only 8 hours long. Spoiler: I didn’t spend 8 hours.

What I did:

• Saturday – watched videos and did skills checks from the vector search fundamentals course. This was interesting. The skills check questions cover a good amount of the exam materials. I watched it on 2x speed. I also skipped most of the lab videos. I watched enough (by checking random time points) to see they were repeating the same concepts from the videos. (The labs aren’t free anyway)
• Sunday – watched the deep dive and autonomous database videos on 2x. These were less interesting because the concepts were high level. The lab videos covered more information but I didn’t watch them in the interest of time. Plus I wasn’t doing the labs. (If you are trying to pass the exam, I recommend spending more time with these videos.) Also, there were no skills check questions in these videos so less interactive.
• Monday – watched the video about preparing for the exam. It came with 12 practice questions which were useful for getting a feel for what to expect.
• Tuesday – did practice exam. This was 30 questions in 60 minutes. Which is less than the real exam, but about the same amount of time per question. The practice exam uses the format of the skills checks, not the format of the exam. It is an excellent representation of what you should expect on the exam. In fact, some of the questions were the same. You can see what you put and the right answer with a short explanation after submitting. I got a 70% on the practice exam. I recommend not taking this practice exam until you feel ready so it serves as a proxy of how prepared you are. You can take it as many times as you want, but the questions and answers are the same (just in a random order)
• Thursday – re-read my notes and took the practice exam again to re-load the info in my head. Had AI generate key points on the Oracle products along with some practice questions to at least try to get some of those questions right.
• 7:30am Friday morning – took real exam. I signed up for it before starting the videos. Most of the choices were early morning or late night so I assume the proctors are still in Asia. And mostly weekdays. (or super late Sunday night which is Monday in Asia). You can join up to 30 minutes early. Checkin was fast so I was done by 7:30am with the exam. Which is nice because today was a work day.

The exam

All the questions were single answer multiple choice. Many were short word problems. Some were multiple choices with each answer being one line of code or in rare cases up to 6 lines of code. A handful were a longer code snippet where you had to identify the purpose of a particular part of the code. Nothing tricky.

A good number of the questions were on the Oracle products that I glossed over in my preparation. But as evidenced by pass, a majority of the questions were on vector databases. I also got a couple about RAG (retrieval augmented generation) in general, but that I was aware of before preparing.

I wrote a separate blog post about the exam engine.

After the exam

You get a score report on the screen right after submitting and an email right away with the same score. It took a few hours to get the second email saying my certview was updated.

Timing

As I mentioned in my experience with the Java 21 exam blog, I typically finish exams with lots of time to spare. This exam was no exception. I finished in 20 minutes. I didn’t bother to do a second pass to check for accuracy since I didn’t care if I passed. So it’s not *all* Oracle exam that are long. Doesn’t help that this one is short if you are trying to take the Java cert though.

How to Study

The learning path is sufficient to take the exam if you go through it more carefully.

Today I took the SAFe 6.0 Practitioner certification and passed with a score of 96%. Passing is 80%. Like the SAFe for ScrumMaster (read about my experience) I was optimizing for passing quickly. However, this time I was more familiar with the material. Also, I wasn’t distracted by taking it on Halloween.

My path to certification

As background, I’ve been a part time SM (and rest of the time developer) for over a decade and been on a SAFe team for a while.

I’m overqualified to be taking this course/exam. I didn’t take it when I was new to SAFe for, um, reasons. Half of my teammates were taking it this week so I figured I’d take it with them to see what was covered. I did learn a couple things and it also gave me an opportunity to reflect.

• April 21-24 – took SAFe6 training course – half a day each of the four days. I found it easier to focus in this class than the SAFe for SMs class for three reasons. First, I wasn’t distracted by helping get ready for a conference. Second some of my direct teammates were in this course so we had a side chat discussing how some of the material applies. Third, my breakout group was more engaged. One of the members (besides me) had agile experience so we got to have some fun debates.
• evening of April 24 – Took the practice exam; got a 96%. Well I’m ready.
• morning of April 25 – Took the real exam. Also got a 96%.

In class they advised us to practice until getting a 90% on the practice exam. Since I got that on my first shot, I didn’t review the material. Also helps that I took the exam right away so didn’t have time to forget anything. (Unlike the SM course where I went to a conference on agile (but not SAFe and then traveled in between the course and the exam)

What I got wrong

Given my score of 96%, I got two questions wrong. On the practice exam, both were in the “Team and System Demo” category. I got a 50% on that section; so there were 4 questions on the topic. For the practice exam, they tell you which questions you got wrong. One was because I misread an answer that had the word “iteration” as PI. Those are clearly different things. The other I still don’t follow as two answers sound the same to me.

On the real exam, I also missed two questions. I got a 0% on production vision/roadmap which means I got the one and only question on that wrong. On flow, I got a 83% suggesting there were 6 questions on this topic and I got 5.

The exam

Like the SM exam, all questions were single answer multiple choice with four possible answers. Some were very easy. Some had two reasonable sounding answers. For a number of them you had to know how SAFe would handle the scenario even if that’s not how another agile framework would. There were definitely some theory vs practice ones. Luckily, I’m well versed on the theory having finished the class yesterday.

Logistics

The exam is non proctored and you don’t have to show your environment on camera. It was nice not to have to clean up all the programming books and papers around me. The environment is exactly the same as the practice tests one.

After the exam

You get a score report with the % right for each category. This part looks like the report for the practice exam. Unlike the practice exam, you don’t see the questions and which ones you got wrong specifically.

Timing

As I mentioned in my experience with the Java 21 exam blog, I typically finish exams with lots of time to spare. This was a 90 minute exam. I finished my first pass in 21 minutes and my second (to clean up the ones I was unsure of) in 5.

How to Study

Granted I didn’t study. But that’s because I’ve been using SAFe a long time. If you are new to SAFe, I don’t recommend immediately taking the practice test or real test. Instead read or skim (depending on how much you remember) the course PDF. Same for the links on the while pages of the PDF at the end of each lesson. Pay special attention to acronyms and lists. Once it looks familiar, take the practice test and see how close you are to ready. (If you take a practice test too early, you lose the predictive value of using it to learn how you will do. This is true of certs in general, not just this one)

And fun fact: one of the questions on the real exam is the same as one of the ones I got on the practice test.