New to this list and am about to embark on getting my Oracle DBA
certification so will probably end up asking u lot some daft
questions, but hopefully i in turn can help others out soon. To start
off with i have a couple of queries the first about certification and
the second about oradim.

First...
Been working with oracle for about 2.5 years as a developer and
touched on DBA stuff having done a 1 week hands on course some
time ago not having strained myself it's now time to get my nose
amongst the books and i would like to ask you how long do u think
it should take an average joe to complete the DBA certification
doing evening study 5/6 times a week for a couple of hours? If you
can't relate to this how did u do the certification and has it improved
your ability/job lot in the market, ?


Second...
Having created the service and instance successfully, i think? but
where is the log file to verify this, tried to look in my
oracle_home\rdbms but no log file, am using 8.1.6 server. When i
run oradim to create a service and instance, does it do it
immediately or do i have to reboot? Can i take it that an instance is
running in memory? Oradim confuses me!
Have tried...
D:\>oradim -shutdown -sid fistsid -usrpwd system -shuttype
srvc,inst -shutmode i
DIM-00018: Failed to stop Oracle Service
O/S-Error: (OS 1060) The specified service does not exist as an
installed service.

Cheers
Rex