Oracle Highlights Certification Path for IT Pros Interested in DBaaS

Since the dawn of commerce, every entrepreneur with a bright idea has had to contend with the often-prohibitive bugaboo known as the "cost of doing business." Balancing income and expenditures can be such a battle that we've even come to view that simple phrase as a pejorative, as when people snark that this or that inconvenient reality is "just the cost of doing business."

Hence, whenever any innovation comes along that makes it a little easier to grapple with the ever-present need of spending money to make money, well, those are the ideas that everyone wants a piece of. With advances in cloud computing driving down the cost of IT infrastructure almost everywhere that tech-preneurs turn, it should come as no surprise that there's a growing market for outsourcing database functions to third-party providers.

Oracle, one of the leading providers of database technology, is encouraging IT pros to grab their surfboards and hop on the wave as DBaaS, or Database-as-a-Service, becomes the next big thing in -aaS. Oracle Certification recommends that database professionals looking to get a leg up in the fast-emerging DBaaS sweepstakes look closely at six certifications in particular, including one that's yet to be released.

The significant six are as follows:

? Oracle Database 12c Administrator Certified Associate
? Oracle Database 12c Administrator Certified Professional
? Oracle Database 12c Administrator Certified Master (Pending release)
? Oracle Certified Expert, Oracle Database 12c: Data Guard Administration
? Oracle Certified Expert, Oracle Database 12c: Performance Management and Tuning
? Oracle Certified Expert, Oracle Database 12c: RAC and Grid Infrastructure Administration

In a post to the Oracle University blog earlier this month, blogger Diana Gray says that market research indicates enterprise adoption of DBaaS is expected to surpass 70 percent next year. So there are plenty of employers in the IT space and elsewhere who are looking for skilled professionals with strong database proficiency. Some analysts are apparently even predicting that DBaaS will dominate the "as a Service" marketplace as soon as 2017.

If you like to be on the leading edge of technology, and especially if you're already on a database career path, then you'd probably be well served to consider these recent strong signals. DBaaS hasn't taken over the IT universe yet, but it could happen soon.