What does the 1Z0-1110-26 exam look like on paper?

The 1Z0-1110-26 exam has 50 multiple choice questions, a 90 minute time limit, a 68 percent passing score and a price of USD 245, which may vary by country. It is the 2026 release of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science Professional exam and replaces the 1Z0-1110-25 code. The 1Z0-1110-24 and 1Z0-1110-23 codes are earlier releases of the same credential.

The arithmetic is worth doing once. Sixty eight percent of 50 is 34, so you can miss 16 questions and still pass. Ninety minutes across 50 questions gives you 108 seconds each, which is generous for a recall item and tight for a scenario that describes a pipeline and asks what breaks it.

If you searched for 1Z0-1110-25 or 1Z0-1110-24 and landed here, you are in the right place. Oracle reissues the code every year, and the syllabus published for the current release is the one to study. The platform itself is described in Oracle’s Data Science service documentation as a fully managed, serverless platform for building, training and managing machine learning models, and that word managed is the key to how the exam is written.

Which five domains does the OCI Data Science Professional syllabus weight?

The OCI Data Science Professional syllabus has five domains. Implement end-to-end Machine Learning Lifecycle carries 45 percent, Apply MLOps Practices 20 percent, Design and set up Data Science Workspace 15 percent, and both OCI Data Science Introduction and Configuration and Use related OCI Services carry 10 percent. On a 50 question paper that is roughly 22 or 23, 10, 7 or 8, 5 and 5 questions.

The question counts are arithmetic from the published weights rather than a published split, so treat them as a planning guide. The shape is what matters. Add up everything that is not the lifecycle domain and you get 55 percent of the paper on configuration, workspace, operations and neighbouring services. A candidate who skips those because they feel like admin work has thrown away more than half the marks before the first modelling question.

The published sample questions show what that looks like in practice. One asks which autoscaling policy type uses CPU utilisation. Another asks the difference between a job and a job run. A third asks which algorithm OCI Vault does not support. Work through a set of 1Z0-1110-26 sample questions before you study anything, and you will see how few of them ask you to reason about a model.

Why is the workspace domain about conda, Vault and Git rather than models?

Design and set up Data Science Workspace is 15 percent of 1Z0-1110-26. It covers four things: creating and managing projects and notebook sessions, creating and managing conda environments, using OCI Vault to store credentials, and configuring source code in Code Repositories with Git. None of them involves a model, and all of them decide whether a model can be built at all.

Projects, notebook sessions and conda environments

A project is the container, and a notebook session is the compute you work in. Oracle describes the session as a JupyterLab based environment, so the interface will be familiar to anyone who has used notebooks elsewhere. If JupyterLab itself is new to you, the Project Jupyter site is the place to learn what a kernel, a cell and a notebook server are before you meet them inside OCI.

Conda environments are how a session gets its Python libraries. The exam expects you to know how to create one, activate it in a session and manage it over time, rather than installing packages ad hoc. The Accelerated Data Science SDK documentation has a whole section on working with conda packs, which tells you how central they are to the way Oracle expects the platform to be used.

Vault and Git are tested on fundamentals

The Vault objective is about keeping credentials out of notebooks. One published sample question asks which of SHA-256, RSA, AES and ECDSA is not a supported encryption algorithm in OCI Vault. The answer is SHA-256, because it is a hash function, not an encryption algorithm. That is the level of the question: understand what the service protects and what the algorithms are for.

The Git objective works the same way. A sample question describes a slow internet connection and asks which two operations would be delayed. Pushing to a remote and pulling from it are the network operations, so they slow down. Committing, staging and turning a local folder into a repository all happen on the notebook’s own storage. If you already use Git daily, this domain is a quick win.

What does the 45 percent machine learning lifecycle domain actually ask?

Implement end-to-end Machine Learning Lifecycle is the largest domain of the OCI Data Science Professional exam at 45 percent, about 22 or 23 questions. Its 14 objectives run from fetching data and profiling it, through training, AutoML, evaluation and explanations, to the Model Catalog and deployment, and finish with four generative AI topics: ADS with OCI Generative AI, LangChain, Operators and AI Quick Actions.

From data source to trained model

The first five objectives are the part a working data scientist already knows: use different data sources to fetch data, explore and prepare it, visualise and profile it, and create and train models with OCI and open source libraries. What the exam adds is the Oracle layer. The ADS SDK documentation covers authentication, conda packs, and running jobs, pipelines and model deployments locally, and those are the mechanics you are expected to recognise.

AutoML, evaluation and explanations

Three objectives sit here: create and use automated machine learning from Oracle AutoML, evaluate models, and obtain global and local model explanations. Global explanations tell you which features drive a model across all its predictions. Local explanations tell you why one particular prediction came out the way it did. Expect to be asked which kind answers which question, not to compute one.

The Model Catalog and deployment

Manage models using the Model Catalog, then deploy and invoke a cataloged model. This is the hinge of the whole exam, because everything in the MLOps domain assumes a model is already in the catalog. The sample questions probe the surrounding details: a model deployed through AI Quick Actions can be invoked through both the API and the CLI, and the outputs of a fine-tuning job land in an OCI Object Storage bucket, not in the catalog and not in the training instance’s local disk.

The generative AI edge

The last four objectives are discussion level: ADS and OCI Generative AI integration, LangChain application deployment to Data Science, Operators, and AI Quick Actions. Generative AI has its own Oracle exam, 1Z0-1127-26, so here the point is to know what each tool does and where its outputs go, not to engineer prompts. Oracle’s documentation defines AI Quick Actions as a set of actions for deploying, evaluating and fine-tuning foundation models from inside a Data Science notebook, starting from an explorer of models Oracle has tested and left unmodified.

“Today, we’re announcing the release of OCI Data Science AI Quick Actions, designed to enable anyone to easily deploy, fine-tune, and evaluate foundation models.”

The AI Quick Actions announcement is worth reading in full for exam purposes. It names the first supported models, recommends at least 100 records for a fine-tuning dataset, and explains that evaluation uses ROUGE and BERTScore. Operators, meanwhile, are the low code side of ADS: forecasting and anomaly detection driven by a configuration file rather than a training script.

How does MLOps show up in the exam?

Apply MLOps Practices is 20 percent of 1Z0-1110-26, about 10 questions. The objectives are the OCI MLOps architecture, creating and managing Jobs for custom tasks, scaling with OCI Data Science, autoscaling model deployments for inference, monitoring and logging with MLOps practices, and using Pipelines to automate the machine learning workflow. This is where a model stops being a notebook and becomes a service.

Jobs and job runs

The distinction the exam likes is simple once stated. A job is a template that describes a task, its code and its compute. A job run is a single execution of that template. You can run the same job many times with different arguments, which is how a training script becomes something scheduled rather than something a person clicks.

Pipelines and step dependencies

Oracle’s documentation describes a pipeline as a resource that defines a workflow of steps, where steps can depend on other steps and can run in sequence or in parallel as long as they form a directed acyclic graph. Each step is discrete, so one pipeline can mix different environments and even different languages. A sample question asks how to make sure data processing happens before training, and the answer is to set a dependency between the steps. The Pipelines documentation lays out the typical sequence of import, transform, train and evaluate.

Autoscaling, monitoring and logging

Autoscaling a model deployment means the inference endpoint adds or removes capacity on a metric. The sample question on this objective asks which policy type a team should configure to scale on CPU utilisation, and the answer is a predefined metric policy rather than a custom one. Know the difference between the two and when you would write your own metric.

Monitoring and logging are a discipline of their own in OCI, and the overlap with this objective is real. The OCI Observability Professional exam article on this site goes deep on the Logging and Monitoring services that a deployed model reports into. For this exam, you need the MLOps view: what to log from a job or a deployment, and how to notice that a model in production has drifted.

Which related OCI services make up the last 10 percent?

Use related OCI Services is the final 10 percent of the OCI Data Science Professional syllabus, about 5 questions. It names three services: creating and managing Spark applications with Data Flow from OCI Data Science, describing the OCI Open Data Service, and creating and exporting a dataset with OCI Data Labeling. Each one sits at a boundary of the data science service rather than inside it.

• Data Flow runs Spark applications, and a notebook session can connect to it when a dataset is too large for the session itself.
• Open Data is a dataset repository built for people who create, use and manipulate datasets, and each dataset comes with code and tooling examples so it can be consumed and reproduced.
• Data Labeling annotates data for supervised learning, and the published sample question makes the scope precise: purchase orders, a typed budget document and images of server racks can be annotated, while an audio recording and video footage cannot.

Five questions is not many, but these are the easiest marks on the paper to lose by omission. Nobody fails to revise the lifecycle domain. Plenty of candidates never open Data Labeling, then meet a question that asks which three file types it can annotate.

Who is the OCI Data Science Professional credential written for?

The OCI Data Science Professional credential is written for people who build and run machine learning on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: data scientists working in Python and open source libraries, machine learning engineers who deploy and monitor models, and OCI engineers asked to configure a tenancy for a data science team. The syllabus says it expects some experience or exposure to OCI, not just to data science.

That last group is easy to overlook. The 10 percent Introduction and Configuration domain covers the service overview, the capabilities of the ADS SDK, and configuring a tenancy for Data Science. One sample question asks which resource types the default matching rules of the Data Science service template include, and the answer names model deployments, notebook sessions and job runs. That is an identity and policy question, and it lands on the person who owns the tenancy.

Oracle’s own description of the OCI Data Science platform sets the scope well: teams of data scientists using Python and open source tools, a JupyterLab environment, NVIDIA GPUs and distributed training for scale, and MLOps capabilities such as automated pipelines, model deployments and model monitoring. Every phrase in that sentence maps to a domain above.

The credential has been reissued every year since at least the 2023 release. This site’s earlier 1Z0-1110-23 preparation guide describes that release as a 55 question paper, and the generative AI objectives did not exist in it. The current 50 question syllabus is the one to work from, and anything written for an older code should be read with that in mind.

How should you prepare for 1Z0-1110-26?

Prepare for 1Z0-1110-26 by spending your time in proportion to the weights: close to half on the machine learning lifecycle, a fifth on MLOps, and the remaining third on workspace setup, tenancy configuration and the related services. Do all of it inside a real OCI tenancy, because the exam asks what the platform does, and that is learned by using it rather than reading about it.

1. Read the five domains and write the question arithmetic next to each, so you plan for roughly 22 lifecycle questions against 5 on tenancy configuration.
2. Configure a tenancy for Data Science, then create a project, a notebook session and a conda environment, because the workspace and configuration domains are 25 percent of the paper and cannot be learned from a slide.
3. Take one small dataset through the whole lifecycle in a notebook: fetch it, profile it, train with an open source library and with AutoML, evaluate it, generate global and local explanations, and save the model to the Model Catalog.
4. Deploy that cataloged model and invoke it, then rebuild the same work as a Job and as a Pipeline with a dependency between the processing step and the training step.
5. Visit the edges: connect a notebook to Data Flow, open a dataset from Open Data, label a handful of documents in Data Labeling, and open AI Quick Actions to see what a deployed foundation model looks like.
6. Finish with timed sets of 50 questions in 90 minutes, and book the exam when you are comfortably above 34 correct.

Two habits pay off during that sequence. Keep a note of every OCI resource name you meet, because the exam uses the platform’s vocabulary and expects you to match it. And read the answer options as a systems engineer would, asking where an output is stored, which service is doing the work and which policy allows it, since that is how most of the platform questions are built.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many questions are on the 1Z0-1110-26 exam?

The 1Z0-1110-26 exam has 50 multiple choice questions with a 90 minute time limit, which works out at 108 seconds per question.

What is the passing score for the OCI Data Science Professional exam?

The passing score is 68 percent. On a 50 question paper that means 34 correct answers, so you can miss 16 questions and still pass.

How much does the 1Z0-1110-26 exam cost?

The exam costs USD 245. Oracle notes that the price may vary by country or by localised currency, so check the figure shown at booking.

Is 1Z0-1110-26 the same exam as 1Z0-1110-25?

They are annual releases of the same credential. 1Z0-1110-26 is the 2026 release and replaces the 1Z0-1110-25 code, with 1Z0-1110-24 and 1Z0-1110-23 before it. Study the syllabus published for the current code.

Which domain is the largest on the OCI Data Science Professional exam?

Implement end-to-end Machine Learning Lifecycle is the largest domain at 45 percent, about 22 or 23 of the 50 questions. Apply MLOps Practices is next at 20 percent.

Does the OCI Data Science Professional exam cover generative AI?

Yes, as four objectives inside the lifecycle domain: ADS and OCI Generative AI integration, LangChain application deployment, Operators, and AI Quick Actions. They are discussion level topics, not prompt engineering.

What is the difference between a job and a job run in OCI Data Science?

A job is a template that defines a task, its code and its compute. A job run is a single execution of that template, and one job can have many runs.

Where can I find OCI Data Science Professional sample questions?

DBExam publishes a free set of ten sample questions with answers for 1Z0-1110-26, covering Open Data, autoscaling, Vault, pipelines, Git, jobs, tenancy templates, Data Labeling and AI Quick Actions.

How long is the OCI Data Science Professional certification valid?

The syllabus published for 1Z0-1110-26 does not state a validity period. Confirm the current renewal terms on Oracle’s certification portal before you plan a recertification date, rather than relying on a third party figure.

Conclusion

The wrong assumption is the expensive one. Candidates who treat 1Z0-1110-26 as a modelling exam revise the part they already know and leave 55 percent of the paper to chance. The syllabus is clear that the OCI Data Science Professional credential measures whether you can set up, run and operate machine learning on the platform: tenancy, workspace, catalog, deployment, jobs, pipelines and the services at the edges.

The numbers give you the plan. Fifty questions, 90 minutes, 34 to pass, with 45 percent on the lifecycle and 20 percent on MLOps. Build one model end to end inside a real tenancy, deploy it, automate it, and visit Data Flow, Open Data and Data Labeling before exam day. Then sit the sample questions on DBExam, and book when your timed scores sit well above the pass mark.

What makes this exam different from other Linux credentials?

Two things: the syllabus includes Oracle Ksplice, which no other vendor’s Linux exam covers, and the format is multiple choice rather than performance based. Everything else on the topic list would be recognisable to anyone who has prepared for a general enterprise Linux credential.

That combination produces a specific kind of paper. A performance based exam proves you can complete tasks under time pressure on a live system. A multiple choice exam at this level proves something narrower and still useful: that you know which mechanism applies, what a configuration does, and where the system keeps the answer when something breaks.

The distinction matters when you are choosing between credentials rather than collecting them. If your estate runs Oracle Linux, this exam covers the distribution you actually administer, including the parts Oracle adds on top of the common base. If it does not, a vendor neutral credential will serve you better, and the performance based Red Hat route is the obvious comparison at a similar level.

What are the 1Z0-106 exam facts?

1Z0-106 runs 90 minutes with 60 multiple choice questions and a 60 percent pass mark, which is 36 correct answers. It costs 245 USD, though Oracle prices vary by country, and passing grants the Oracle Certified Professional, Oracle Linux 8 System Administrator credential.

A word on where those figures come from. Oracle’s certification portal returns an error to anything but a browser, and its learning site serves an application shell with no readable specification inside it, so none of this can be checked against the vendor the way a CompTIA or Cisco figure can. These are the exam catalogue’s numbers, they are internally consistent, and you should confirm the price at registration since Oracle localises it.

For the same reason this guide states no validity period and no retake rule: Oracle publishes neither where it can be read. Ninety seconds per question is comfortable, so the practical constraint is breadth rather than speed, and a 1Z0-106 practice test is the quickest way to find which of the 21 areas you have never touched.

How do you plan for a syllabus with no weightings?

You plan by objective count and by how much of the working day each area occupies, because Oracle publishes no percentages for this exam. Twenty one areas across 60 questions averages under three questions each, which tells you immediately that depth in one favourite area cannot carry the paper.

That average is the most useful planning number available. It means no single area can be worth revising exhaustively, and it means an area you skip entirely costs you roughly three questions, or five percent of the mark, which is most of the margin between 60 percent and a fail.

The sensible approach is coverage first, depth second. Work the whole list once, mark every area where you could not explain the mechanism to a colleague, and spend your remaining time only on those. Candidates who fail this paper usually do so by knowing six areas extremely well and four not at all.

What do the core administration topics cover?

The first half of the syllabus is conventional enterprise Linux administration: the boot process and GRUB 2, kernel boot parameters, systemd, system configuration through /etc/sysconfig, the /proc and /sys filesystems, sysctl, time synchronisation with chrony, NTP and PTP, package management, task automation, users and groups, filesystems and swap, storage devices, networking and OpenSSH.

Two details in that list are worth pausing on, because they are where multiple choice questions tend to live. The first is the difference between a runtime kernel parameter set through sysctl and a boot parameter set in GRUB, which is a distinction the exam can test cleanly without a lab. The second is time: chrony, NTP and PTP are named separately, and the exam expects you to know which one a situation calls for rather than merely that time synchronisation exists.

The behaviour of systemd runs underneath much of this material. Units, targets, dependencies and the journal appear across the boot, service, logging and troubleshooting areas, so a candidate fluent in systemd picks up marks in four separate topic areas rather than one. The kernel side of the same material is documented at the kernel project, which is worth reading once for boot parameters if that ground is unfamiliar.

Why does Ksplice have its own topic area?

Because it solves a problem every other distribution answers with a reboot. Ksplice applies kernel and userspace patches to a running system, so a security fix can be applied without a maintenance window, and it is Oracle technology rather than part of the common Linux base.

That is why it earns a topic area of its own on this syllabus and appears on no competing vendor’s Linux exam. If you administer Oracle Linux in an environment with uptime commitments, it is also the feature most likely to justify the certification to a manager, because the operational saving is concrete.

For the exam, the examinable ground is what Ksplice does, when it applies, how it is managed, and what its limits are. The vendor documents the service on the Ksplice site, and it is one of the few areas where a candidate cannot fall back on general Linux experience, because there is no general equivalent to fall back on.

How much security does the syllabus expect?

Three of the 21 areas are security mechanisms that administrators commonly work around rather than with: Security Enhanced Linux, pluggable authentication modules, and the Linux auditing system. Each gets its own heading, which is a fair signal of how the exam treats them.

SELinux is the one candidates most often under-prepare, because in practice many estates run it permissive and move on. The exam is not interested in that pragmatism. It expects the modes, contexts, booleans and the relationship between a denial and a policy, which is knowledge you can only fake for about two questions. The project’s own material at the SELinux project repository is the authoritative reference.

PAM rewards a different habit. It is a stack, and almost every PAM question is really about order and control flags, so drawing one real stack out and tracing a login through it converts the whole area from memorisation into something you can reason about. The audit system rounds the group off: what it records, where it writes, and how to ask it a question after the fact.

Control groups and container services

Control groups and container services appear as two separate areas late in the syllabus, and together they are the part of the list that dates the exam most clearly to a modern estate. Cgroups govern how resources are allocated and capped; container services cover running containers on the host rather than orchestrating them across a cluster.

Keep the scope in mind while revising. This is host level container administration, not orchestration: nothing here is asking about clusters, schedulers or service meshes. The examinable material is what the host provides, how a container consumes it, and how cgroups bound that consumption.

Advanced storage administration and file sharing sit alongside them and follow the same pattern. The topics are broad, the depth is moderate, and the questions reward someone who has configured the thing once rather than someone who has read about it twice.

Who should take this exam?

It suits administrators running Oracle Linux in production, engineers supporting Oracle Database or Exadata estates where the operating system is part of the stack they own, and sysadmins whose employer is an Oracle shop and wants a credential that matches. Oracle publishes no prerequisite, though the word advanced in the title is accurate.

It is a weak fit for two groups. Anyone whose estate is Red Hat, Ubuntu or SUSE gains little from a distribution specific paper, especially one covering a feature they do not run. And anyone who wants to prove practical ability under exam conditions will find a multiple choice format less persuasive to a technical interviewer than a performance based one.

There is one more group worth naming: candidates who already hold an Oracle credential on the database side and want the operating system underneath it. That is a coherent pairing, and the Oracle Database SQL route covers the other half of the same estate.

How should you prepare?

Cover all 21 areas before deepening any of them, get hands on an Oracle Linux 8 system, and treat Ksplice and SELinux as the two areas where general Linux experience will not carry you. With roughly three questions per area, the exam punishes gaps far more than it rewards specialism.

1. List the 21 topic areas and rate your confidence in each one honestly. The list itself is the study plan.
2. Build an Oracle Linux 8 virtual machine and work through the areas you rated lowest, in order.
3. Spend a dedicated session on Ksplice, which is the one area with no equivalent elsewhere.
4. Trace one real PAM stack and one real SELinux denial end to end, rather than reading about either.
5. Practise distinguishing the mechanisms that look alike: sysctl against boot parameters, chrony against NTP and PTP, cgroups against container limits.
6. Sit a full timed set and use the result to find the areas you skipped rather than to confirm the ones you enjoy.

An earlier walkthrough of this same paper is still useful on tactics rather than content, and that 1Z0-106 preparation guide predates the current catalogue figures, so read it for method and take the numbers from here.

One practical note on the format: because the paper is multiple choice, elimination is a legitimate technique in a way it never is on a performance based exam. Knowing that two of four answers are impossible is worth a mark, and at a 60 percent threshold those marks decide results.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many questions are on the 1Z0-106 exam?

Sixty multiple choice questions in 90 minutes, which is about 90 seconds each.

What is the passing score for 1Z0-106?

Sixty percent, which works out at 36 correct answers from 60.

How much does the exam cost?

Two hundred and forty five US dollars, and Oracle varies pricing by country, so confirm the local figure when you book.

What credential does passing it earn?

Oracle Certified Professional, Oracle Linux 8 System Administrator.

Are the topic areas weighted?

No. Oracle publishes no weightings for this exam, so plan by objective rather than by percentage. Twenty one areas across 60 questions averages just under three questions each.

Is the exam hands on?

No. It is multiple choice, which is the main format difference between this credential and the performance based Red Hat route at a similar level.

What is Ksplice and why is it on the syllabus?

Ksplice applies kernel patches to a running system without a reboot. It is Oracle technology, it has its own topic area, and no competing vendor’s Linux exam covers it.

Are there prerequisites?

None are published, although the syllabus assumes real administration experience rather than first exposure to Linux.

How long is the certification valid?

Oracle does not publish a validity period where it can be read, so this guide does not state one. Check your certification record after passing.

Does it cover Oracle Linux 9?

No. The release is named in the exam title, and this paper covers Oracle Linux 8.

Conclusion

1Z0-106 is a breadth exam for people who run Oracle Linux specifically. Sixty multiple choice questions, 90 minutes, 60 percent to pass, 245 USD, and 21 topic areas that Oracle declines to weight.

Plan for coverage rather than depth, because under three questions per area means a skipped topic costs about as much as the margin you have to spare. Give Ksplice and SELinux their own sessions, since neither yields to general Linux experience, and build the virtual machine rather than reading about the commands.

Treat the published figures as the catalogue’s rather than the vendor’s, because Oracle’s own pages cannot be read from outside a browser, and confirm the price when you book. Then work the topic list in order of your own weakness, which is the only prioritisation this syllabus offers.

What does the OCI Observability Professional certification cover?

The OCI Observability Professional certification validates that an engineer can monitor, trace and troubleshoot workloads running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using Oracle’s own Observability and Management services. It spans metrics and alarms, the Events service, Logging, Logging Analytics, Application Performance Monitoring and Stack Monitoring across seven weighted domains.

Those are six distinct products rather than one, and the exam treats them as such. Oracle groups them under a single observability and management platform, but each service has its own concepts, its own ingestion model and its own console experience, and the syllabus tests them separately.

The credential sits at professional level, which in Oracle’s scheme means hands-on rather than foundational. The syllabus says as much directly: Oracle recommends combining courses with practice and real experience, because the questions are written to test applied knowledge rather than recall. Oracle runs several professional level OCI papers on the same pattern, and the OCI data science exam is a good example of how much of each one is platform work.

One thing the exam is not is vendor-neutral observability theory. There is a domain about the pillars, and it is the joint smallest on the paper. Everything else is Oracle’s implementation of them.

Where do the marks sit across the seven domains?

Logging Analytics is the largest domain at 22 percent, followed by Application Performance Monitoring at 20 percent and metrics and alarms at 18 percent. Central log management takes 16 percent, the Events service 10 percent, and both the observability pillars and Stack Monitoring 7 percent each. Seven domains, and a spread of 15 points between the biggest and the smallest.

With only 50 questions on the paper, a 7 percent domain is about four items and a 22 percent domain is about eleven. That is a real difference in study value, but it also means no domain is safely ignorable: four questions is a third of the 16-question margin a 68 percent pass mark gives you.

The three heaviest domains are all things you configure and read rather than things you define. Logging Analytics, APM and Monitoring together account for 60 percent, and all three reward console time over reading.

Working sample items across all seven is the fastest way to find out which service you have only read about. The sets on the money site’s 1Z0-1111-26 practice questions follow the published weightings, so an uneven profile across the two log domains in particular shows up quickly.

Two domains are about logs, and they are not the same skill

Central log management is 16 percent and log pattern analysis is 22 percent, which puts 38 percent of the exam on log data. They are separate domains because they are separate services with separate jobs: one gets logs into a single place, the other turns what is there into answers.

Logging, at 16 percent, is about collection and movement

Three objectives sit here. Distinguishing log categories and enabling collection from sources. Managing and searching logs across the whole estate. Creating connectors to move logs somewhere else.

The category distinction is the one people underestimate. OCI separates audit logs, service logs and custom logs, and which one a given signal lands in decides where you look for it and what you can do with it. The connector objective is equally practical: it is about routing, and a question about it is usually really a question about which destination is legitimate for which log type.

Collection from outside OCI is part of this too, and that is where the syslog protocol specification becomes relevant background rather than trivia, because the shape of an incoming record decides how usefully it can be parsed later.

Logging Analytics, at 22 percent, is about interpretation

Four objectives, and the verbs escalate. Distinguish the key concepts. Explore ingestion methods. Analyse search, filter and visualise. Present advanced analytics and features for troubleshooting.

The distinction that matters between the two domains is that Logging lets you find a line and Logging Analytics lets you find a pattern. One answers what happened at 03:14. The other answers whether it has been happening for a fortnight. Oracle’s Logging service documentation is the right starting point for the first, and it will not prepare you for the second.

Candidates who use OCI daily often have the first domain covered by habit and the second barely at all, because reaching for pattern analysis is a deliberate act rather than a reflex. That asymmetry is the single most common gap on this exam.

How is the 1Z0-1111-26 exam delivered and scored?

1Z0-1111-26 is a 50 question multiple choice exam with a 90 minute limit and a 68 percent pass mark, priced at USD $245 with regional variation. That works out at 108 seconds per question and 34 correct answers to pass, leaving a margin of 16.

Sixty eight percent is a tighter bar than it reads

Most professional cloud exams sit in the low sixties, and each percentage point here is worth half a question on a 50 item paper. Thirty four out of 50 means you can lose the whole of Logging Analytics and one other domain and still fail, which is the arithmetic behind the advice not to leave a weak service unaddressed.

One note on where these figures come from

Every specification above is published on the money site’s syllabus page for this exam. Oracle’s own certification portal returns an error to automated retrieval and its learning site renders entirely in the browser, so none of these figures could be independently re-confirmed against Oracle at the time of writing. They are reproduced as published rather than presented as vendor-confirmed.

What does the APM domain expect you to have done?

Application Performance Monitoring is 20 percent of the paper across three objectives: the key concepts of APM, instrumenting applications for data collection, and visualising and analysing the performance data that comes back. The middle objective is the one that separates candidates, because instrumentation is something you have either done or only read about.

Instrumenting an application means deciding what gets traced, attaching an agent or a library, and accepting that some of your latency budget now goes to telemetry. Questions written around that objective tend to be about consequences rather than syntax.

• Which components need an agent and which can be observed from outside.
• What a trace actually contains once a request crosses a service boundary.
• How synthetic monitoring differs from real user data, and when each answers the question you have.
• Why a dashboard showing healthy infrastructure can sit alongside an application users describe as slow.

The instrumentation model here is the same one the wider industry has settled on, and reading the OpenTelemetry project overview is a useful way to understand the vocabulary of spans, traces and context propagation before mapping it onto Oracle’s implementation.

Stack Monitoring, at 7 percent, is the quiet counterpart. Two objectives, covering the key concepts and discovering resources to monitor with metrics. It is the domain that watches the middleware and database tier underneath the application, and it is small enough that most candidates cover it in an afternoon and large enough that skipping it costs four questions.

Is this 1Z0-1111-25 under a new number?

Broadly yes. Oracle refreshes its cloud exam codes annually, so 1Z0-1111-26 is the current form of the credential that was previously sat as 1Z0-1111-25. The certification name does not change with the code, and the seven domains published for the current version are the ones to plan against.

The practical problem is that search demand has not moved with the code. Almost every recorded query for this exam still carries the 2025 number, which means a candidate searching for study material will find pages written for the previous version sitting above pages written for the current one.

Two habits protect you. Check the code on any breakdown before planning around it, and check the domain list rather than the title, since a page can carry the right code and an older set of weightings. Where the two disagree, the money site’s syllabus page for the current code is the version to trust.

Oracle’s annual roll affects the whole OCI line rather than this exam alone, so the same caution applies to adjacent credentials. The OCI DevOps professional exam moved to its own -26 code in the same cycle, and material for the previous generation is still circulating there too.

Who is this exam a fair test for?

It is a fair test for someone who already operates workloads on OCI and has been asked to explain a production problem after the fact. It is a harder test than it looks for a cloud engineer from another provider, because six named Oracle services have to be learned as products rather than as concepts.

The second row is the interesting one. Somebody who has run a mature observability stack elsewhere knows more about the subject than the exam requires, and less about the product than it demands. Their preparation is mostly translation, and it is quicker than they fear once they stop looking for equivalents and start learning the boundaries.

For readers mapping this credential against the rest of the OCI professional track before committing, the OCI multicloud architect credential sits at the same level with a very different scope, which is a useful contrast when deciding which to take first.

How should you prepare for 1Z0-1111-26?

Build the preparation around the two log domains first, because together they are 38 percent and they are the pair most likely to be unevenly covered by real experience. The sequence below moves from what most OCI engineers already do toward what they usually do not.

1. Map the seven domains onto the six services so you always know which product a question is really about, since the domain titles describe outcomes rather than naming the service.
2. Enable log collection from a source in each of the three categories, audit, service and custom, and confirm where each one lands.
3. Build a connector that moves logs to another destination, then check what arrives and what does not.
4. Ingest a log set into Logging Analytics and work a genuine troubleshooting question through search, filter and visualisation rather than stopping at the first matching line.
5. Define an alarm from a metric, trigger it deliberately, and read what the notification actually contains.
6. Write an Events rule and integrate it with another OCI service, since the Events domain is small but entirely practical.
7. Instrument one application for APM end to end, then compare what synthetic monitoring tells you against what real user data tells you.
8. Spend an afternoon on Stack Monitoring discovery, which is enough for a 7 percent domain and more than most candidates give it.
9. Finish with timed sets of 50 questions in 90 minutes, tracking the score for the two log domains separately from everything else.

Step one matters more than its position suggests. Several domain titles on this syllabus describe a goal rather than a product, and a candidate who has not made that mapping loses time in the exam working out which service a question is set in.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many questions are on the 1Z0-1111-26 exam?

Fifty multiple choice questions with a 90 minute limit, which is 108 seconds each. The pass mark of 68 percent means 34 correct answers, leaving a margin of 16.

What is the passing score for the OCI Observability Professional exam?

68 percent. That is higher than most professional level cloud exams, and on a 50 question paper each percentage point is worth roughly half a question, so the margin is tighter than it sounds.

How much does the exam cost?

USD $245 as published, with pricing varying by country and by localised currency. Training is a separate and optional cost.

Which domain is the largest?

Logging Analytics at 22 percent, roughly eleven questions. Application Performance Monitoring follows at 20 percent and metrics and alarms at 18 percent, so the three console-heavy services carry 60 percent between them.

Is 1Z0-1111-26 the same exam as 1Z0-1111-25?

It is the current form of the same credential. Oracle rolls its cloud exam codes annually, so plan against the domains published for the -26 code and treat older breakdowns as a version behind.

How much of the exam is about logs?

Thirty eight percent, split across two domains. Central log management is 16 percent and log pattern analysis is 22 percent, and they test different skills rather than the same one twice.

Do you need to have instrumented an application for APM?

It is strongly advisable. Instrumenting applications for data collection is one of three objectives in a 20 percent domain, and questions about it turn on consequences that are hard to reason about without having done it.

How much of the exam is observability theory?

Very little. The domain that defines the pillars is 7 percent, roughly four questions. Everything else is Oracle’s implementation, so conceptual knowledge from another platform helps less than it might seem.

Is Stack Monitoring worth studying?

Yes, and briefly. At 7 percent it is about four questions across two objectives, which most candidates can cover in an afternoon. Skipping it spends a quarter of your pass margin before you start.

Can I confirm these figures on Oracle’s own site?

Not easily. Oracle’s certification portal returns an error to automated retrieval and its learning site renders in the browser rather than serving readable content, so published third-party syllabus pages are the practical reference for exam specifications.

Conclusion

The useful way to read 1Z0-1111-26 is as an exam about six Oracle services rather than one about observability. The concept itself is worth four questions. Logging Analytics alone is worth eleven, and the two log domains together outweigh anything else on the paper.

That reframing changes the study plan immediately. Time spent rehearsing the three pillars is time not spent in Logging Analytics, and Logging Analytics is where most OCI engineers discover they have been reading logs rather than analysing them.

Once the seven domains are mapped onto the services behind them, timed practice across all of them is the quickest way to see which service is still costing you marks.

What Does the OCI DevOps Professional Certification Actually Cover?

The OCI DevOps Professional certification covers the delivery toolchain on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: containers and Docker, the OCI Registry, Terraform and OCI Resource Manager, the OCI DevOps service with its code repositories and build pipelines, Container Engine for Kubernetes, OCI Vault, and the monitoring and logging services. It validates delivery engineering, not database administration. Once a pipeline is running, the next question is how you watch it, and that is where the OCI Observability Professional exam picks up.

Oracle awards the credential Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Certified DevOps Professional on a pass. The word that matters in that name is professional. This is the second tier of the OCI ladder, above the associate level, and the blueprint assumes you have already stood up resources in a tenancy and understand compartments, policies and networking well enough that the exam does not need to test them again.

What the exam does test is whether you can take an application from source control to a running workload without touching a console by hand. That is a narrow, practical brief, and it explains why the objectives read like a pipeline rather than a syllabus. You containerise, you store the image, you declare the infrastructure, you build, you deploy, you orchestrate, you secure, you observe. Each of those verbs maps to a weighted block. Anyone weighing the credential against the cost can compare the blueprint with the practice material on the 1Z0-1109-26 exam page before committing to a booking.

The services you have to recognise by name

The blueprint names its services explicitly rather than describing capabilities in the abstract. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Registry, Container Instances, Resource Manager, DevOps Code Repositories, Container Engine for Kubernetes, Vault, Monitoring, Logging and Events all appear by name in the objectives. A candidate who knows the concepts but not the product names will lose marks on wording alone, because the questions use Oracle’s vocabulary. For the vendor neutral half of that toolchain, Terraform Associate credential covers the provisioning layer itself.

What Are the 1Z0-1109-26 Exam Details?

1Z0-1109-26 is a 50 question multiple choice paper with a 90 minute limit and a 68 percent passing score, priced at 245 US dollars before local currency adjustment. That works out at 34 correct answers to pass, and roughly 108 seconds per question if you use the full window.

Sixty eight percent is a higher bar than it looks. On a 50 question paper every single question is worth two percentage points, so the margin between a pass and a fail is sixteen questions wide in total but only one question wide at the boundary. There is no partial credit and no compensation between domains, which means a candidate who is strong on pipelines and weak on Kubernetes cannot average their way through. Both of those blocks are worth fifteen questions each.

The 90 minute window is generous for recall questions and tight for scenario questions, and this paper leans toward the second kind. Objectives phrased as evaluate and configure, rather than describe or list, tend to produce questions with a short deployment scenario attached. Reading those carefully takes longer than the average pace allows, so the practical approach is to bank time on the recognition questions early.

Why Do CI/CD and Kubernetes Take Sixty Percent of the Marks?

Because they are the two places where a delivery engineer actually spends the day. Configuring and managing continuous integration and continuous delivery carries 30 percent of 1Z0-1109-26, and managing containers using a container orchestration engine carries another 30 percent. Together they account for thirty of the fifty questions, leaving the remaining four blocks to share twenty.

The blueprint lists six weighted blocks, and the first two share a heading even though their objectives are entirely different. The 15 percent block is about containers. The 10 percent block underneath it is about declaring infrastructure in code. Read them as two separate subjects, because the questions certainly will.

That distribution has a direct consequence for study planning. A candidate who allocates time evenly across six blocks spends as long on monitoring, worth two or three questions, as on Kubernetes, worth fifteen. The honest allocation follows the weights: roughly three days of pipeline work and three days of cluster work for every one day spent on logging and metrics.

What the two big blocks have in common

Both reward hands-on repetition rather than reading. Pipelines and clusters are systems you learn by breaking, and the objectives use verbs that assume you have. Create and configure various deployment strategies is not a definition question. Neither is optimise Kubernetes clusters in the OCI environment.

How Much Docker and Container Work Does the Exam Expect?

Enough to build an image, understand why you would, and manage where it lives. The 15 percent containerisation block asks you to identify the need for containerisation, create containers using Docker, explain and implement microservices architecture, and then create and manage both Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Registry and OCI Container Instances.

The microservices objective is the one candidates underestimate. It is not asking for a definition of a microservice. It sits alongside the containerisation objectives because the exam wants to know whether you understand what breaking a monolith apart does to deployment, versioning and inter service communication. Questions in this area tend to present an architecture and ask what follows from it.

OCI Registry is the storage layer for images, and Container Instances is the option for running a container without standing up a cluster at all. That second service matters more than its share of the objectives suggests, because the exam repeatedly asks you to choose the right compute target. A short lived batch job does not need Kubernetes. Recognising when a cluster is the wrong answer is itself a tested skill.

• Build an image locally and push it to OCI Registry, then pull it from a different compartment
• Tag images deliberately, because image versioning appears in both this block and the security block
• Run the same image on Container Instances and on a cluster, and note what changes
• Know which registry operations need which policy statements

Where Does Infrastructure as Code Fit in the Blueprint?

In a 10 percent block of its own, covering two objectives: deploying infrastructure using infrastructure as code and Terraform on OCI, and streamlining infrastructure deployment and configuration with OCI Resource Manager. That is five questions, and both objectives point at the same idea from different angles.

Terraform is the language and the engine. Resource Manager is Oracle’s managed service for running it, so that state files, plan and apply runs, and stack configuration live inside the tenancy rather than on an engineer’s laptop. A candidate who has only ever run Terraform locally will recognise the syntax questions and stumble on the Resource Manager ones, because stacks, jobs and configuration sources are Oracle specific vocabulary.

Understanding the tool itself pays off beyond this exam. HashiCorp’s own introduction to what Terraform is explains the declarative model and the state file clearly, and the state file is where most exam scenarios hide their trap. Two engineers applying the same configuration against divergent state is a classic question shape.

The detail that separates the two objectives

Terraform questions test what the configuration does. Resource Manager questions test who can run it, where the state is kept, and how a stack is updated safely. Study both, and keep them mentally separate, because the answer options often mix vocabulary from each to see whether you can tell them apart.

What Does the DevSecOps Domain Ask You to Secure?

Three specific surfaces, at 10 percent of the paper. The DevSecOps block covers configuring security using DevSecOps practice on OCI, creating and managing encryption keys and secrets in OCI Vault, evaluating and configuring security inside the OCI DevOps CI/CD pipelines, and securing the container images used in OCI.

Vault is the anchor. Keys and secrets are a single objective, but they behave differently: a key is used to encrypt something, a secret is a value the pipeline needs at run time, and the exam expects you to know which one a given scenario calls for. Hard coding a credential into a build specification is the wrong answer in every question where it appears, and it appears often.

Pipeline security and image security are the other two surfaces, and they connect. An image is only as trustworthy as the pipeline that built it, and a pipeline is only as trustworthy as the identities allowed to trigger it. Oracle’s own documentation on the OCI DevOps service sets out how build and deployment stages are defined, which is the structure the security questions assume you already picture.

Ten percent is five questions, and this block is the highest return per hour of study in the whole blueprint. The material is finite, the service list is short, and the correct answers follow a consistent principle: move the secret out of the artefact, and scope the permission to the stage that needs it.

Why Is Monitoring Only Five Percent?

Because the exam treats observability as a supporting discipline rather than a delivery one. At 5 percent, monitoring and observability is the smallest block on 1Z0-1109-26, worth two or three questions, and it covers DevOps measurement concepts plus three services: OCI Monitoring for metrics, OCI Logging for logs, and OCI Events for event driven reactions.

That weighting is a deliberate scoping choice rather than a judgement about importance. Oracle publishes a separate observability track, and this exam stops at the boundary where a delivery engineer hands a running workload to whoever watches it. The questions reflect that: they ask which service you would use and what it emits, not how to design an alerting strategy.

DevOps measurement is worth a short look even so. The concepts of deployment frequency, lead time and change failure rate are the vocabulary the objective points at, and a question that asks what a shortening lead time indicates is answerable from first principles once you know the terms.

The practical advice is to study this block last and study it quickly. Two or three questions do not justify the time that the two 30 percent blocks demand, and a candidate who runs out of preparation time has lost far less here than anywhere else on the paper.

Who Should Sit This Exam, and Who Should Not?

It suits engineers who already deliver software on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and want the professional tier credential to prove it. It does not suit Oracle database administrators looking for a natural next step, and it does not suit DevOps engineers with no OCI exposure at all, because every objective is expressed in Oracle service names.

The clearest fit is a platform or delivery engineer at an organisation that runs on OCI, who has built pipelines and operated clusters there and wants the credential on record. The second clearest is a multi cloud engineer whose Kubernetes and Terraform skills transfer directly, and who needs to learn the Oracle service equivalents rather than the underlying concepts. That candidate usually converts fastest, because the hard part is already done.

Database professionals are the group most likely to pick this exam for the wrong reason. The 1Z0 prefix implies continuity that does not exist here. Someone coming from Oracle Database certifications will find nothing familiar in the blueprint, and would be better served by a database track exam.

If you are weighing this against another OCI professional credential, the comparison worth making is with the architecture track. Our guide to the OCI Multicloud Architect exam covers a credential at the same tier with a very different centre of gravity, and reading the two blueprints side by side usually settles the question quickly.

Prior exposure that genuinely helps

• Working knowledge of compartments, policies and the OCI identity model
• Having built and pushed a container image, in any registry
• Having run at least one Kubernetes cluster in production or in a lab
• Having applied a Terraform configuration and then had to reconcile state

How Should You Prepare for 1Z0-1109-26?

By following the weights rather than the syllabus order. The blueprint lists containerisation first and monitoring last, but the marks are concentrated in CI/CD and Kubernetes, so a preparation plan that mirrors the reading order spends its best hours in the wrong places. Build the plan around the 30 percent blocks and fit everything else around them.

1. Start by standing up a free tier tenancy and confirming you can create a compartment and a policy, because every later step assumes that access already works.
2. Build a container image and push it to OCI Registry, then run the same image on Container Instances, so the difference between a registry and a runtime is concrete rather than theoretical.
3. Move to the CI/CD block and build one complete pipeline in the OCI DevOps service, from a code repository through an artefact to a deployment, before you read anything further about deployment strategies.
4. Rebuild that pipeline with a different deployment strategy, because the objective asks you to create and configure various strategies and the differences only become memorable once you have seen two of them run.
5. Create an OKE cluster and work through deployments, networking, storage and scaling on it, giving this step as much time as the pipeline work since both blocks carry 30 percent.
6. Add OCI Vault to the pipeline you already built, replacing any hard coded value with a secret reference, which covers most of the DevSecOps block in a single exercise.
7. Finish with monitoring and logging, spending an afternoon rather than a week, and use the time to attach metrics and logs to the workload you have already deployed.

Kubernetes is where most candidates need the most outside reading, because OKE assumes the upstream concepts rather than teaching them. The project’s own Kubernetes concepts overview is the efficient way to fill gaps in deployments, services and scheduling, and Oracle’s Kubernetes Engine overview then maps those concepts onto cluster types, node pools and OKE specific management.

One more habit pays off disproportionately. Every time you finish an exercise, write down which Oracle service name you just used, because the exam tests recognition of those names as much as it tests the underlying engineering. Candidates preparing for an earlier release of this credential found the same thing, and the approach in our earlier OCI DevOps guide still holds where the services have not changed.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many questions are on the 1Z0-1109-26 exam?

Fifty multiple choice questions, with a 90 minute limit. At a 68 percent pass mark you need 34 correct answers, which leaves room for sixteen wrong ones across the whole paper.

What is the passing score for OCI DevOps Professional?

Sixty eight percent. Because the paper has 50 questions, each one is worth two percentage points, and there is no compensation between domains or partial credit on any item.

How much does 1Z0-1109-26 cost?

USD 245, though the amount varies by country and by the local currency it is charged in. That is the exam fee only and does not include any training or practice material.

Does the OCI DevOps Professional certification involve databases?

No. Despite the 1Z0 exam code prefix, the blueprint contains no database objectives. It covers containers, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, DevSecOps and observability on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Which domain carries the most marks?

Two domains tie at 30 percent each: continuous integration and continuous delivery, and managing containers using a container orchestration engine. Between them they account for thirty of the fifty questions.

How much Kubernetes do I need to know?

A substantial amount. The orchestration block asks for cluster creation and access, deployments, networking, storage, observability, scaling, admission controllers, cluster upgrades and OKE security, which is a full operational surface rather than an introduction.

Is Terraform tested on this exam?

Yes, in the 10 percent infrastructure as code block, alongside OCI Resource Manager. The objectives name Terraform on OCI directly, so configuration syntax and state behaviour both matter.

What credential do I get for passing?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Certified DevOps Professional. It sits at the professional tier of the OCI certification ladder, above the associate level exams.

Is monitoring worth studying for 1Z0-1109-26?

Briefly. At 5 percent it is the smallest block, worth two or three questions, covering OCI Monitoring, OCI Logging and OCI Events plus basic DevOps measurement concepts. Study it last.

Conclusion

1Z0-1109-26 is a delivery engineering exam wearing an Oracle database prefix, and reading it that way changes how you prepare for it. Fifty questions, 90 minutes, 68 percent to pass, and a blueprint where continuous delivery and Kubernetes take sixty of the hundred marks between them while observability takes five. The services are named explicitly, from OCI Registry and Resource Manager through to Vault and Events, and the questions use those names rather than generic terminology.

The preparation that works follows the weights instead of the reading order, builds one real pipeline and one real cluster rather than reading about both, and treats the DevSecOps block as the highest return per hour on the paper. Once your own lab work lines up with the blueprint, a run through a practice set is the sensible way to find out which of the six blocks still owes you time.

What Does an OCI Multicloud Architect Actually Do?

An OCI multicloud architect designs and runs Oracle workloads that span Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and at least one other public cloud. In practice that means federating identity between providers, building private network paths between them, and placing Oracle database services physically inside Azure or Google Cloud regions so applications there can reach them at local latency.

The job exists because a large share of enterprise data still lives in Oracle databases while a large share of new application development happens elsewhere. Moving one to match the other is expensive and slow. Running both, connected properly, has become the pragmatic answer, and Oracle built a certification track around the people who make that work. Teams running those workloads also need delivery skills, which is what the OCI DevOps professional exam certifies.

Why the role is not just networking

It would be easy to read the syllabus as a connectivity exam. It is not. Connectivity is 20 percent. The larger share goes to provisioning and operating database services in someone else’s datacentre, which brings in onboarding flows, subscription linkage, resource placement, and disaster recovery design. You need the network knowledge, but it is the entry fee rather than the subject.

Oracle’s own multicloud portfolio page sets out the services this exam covers and how they are positioned against single-cloud deployment.

Where Do the Marks Sit Across the Five Domains?

Five domains carry published weightings. Implement Oracle Database@Azure is the heaviest at 30 percent. Core OCI Services Overview, Configure Multicloud Connection Options and Implement Oracle Database@Google Cloud each carry 20 percent. Introduction to Multicloud, the only conceptual domain, is worth 10 percent. Half the paper is therefore about running Oracle databases inside another provider’s cloud. Weighted blueprints run right across the OCI professional track, and the observability professional certification splits its marks the same way.

The arithmetic is worth doing. At 68 percent you can afford to lose 16 questions. Drop the whole Database@Azure domain and you have already lost 15 of them, which leaves almost no room anywhere else. There is no version of a pass that skips the Azure material.

The one domain you can afford to skim

Introduction to Multicloud carries five questions and asks only that you explain multicloud, its benefits, and common use cases in OCI. It rewards vocabulary rather than practice. Read it once properly, and spend the time you save on provisioning.

What Is the 1Z0-1151-25 Exam Format?

1Z0-1151-25 is a 50 question multiple choice paper with a 90 minute limit, a 68 percent passing score, and a $245 USD price that varies by country and local currency. That works out at 108 seconds per question, which is comfortable by Oracle professional standards and leaves room to reason through a scenario rather than recall a fact.

A 68 percent cut on 50 questions means 34 correct answers. That is a genuinely professional bar, but it is not the 80 percent some Oracle specialist exams demand. The generous clock is the more useful signal: Oracle expects scenario questions here, not definitions. Working through the domain-by-domain 1Z0-1151-25 practice questions is the fastest way to find out whether your reading has turned into judgement.

Which Core OCI Services Does the Exam Assume You Know?

Three areas, and they are named individually rather than left vague. You must federate OCI Identity Domains with external identity providers, implement and manage Virtual Cloud Network components, and administer OCI database services including Base Databases, Autonomous Databases and HeatWave. Twenty percent of the paper sits here, and none of it is multicloud-specific.

This domain is where candidates coming from an Azure or Google background lose marks. The multicloud material is new to everybody, so it levels the field. Core OCI is not new to an OCI engineer, and the exam assumes that baseline without teaching it.

Identity federation is the piece that matters most

Federating OCI Identity Domains with an external identity provider is the first thing you do in any real multicloud build, and it is the first objective listed. Expect questions on the trust relationship, attribute mapping, and what actually happens to a user’s OCI authorisation when the external provider is the source of truth.

What the database line really covers

• Base Database Service – the customer-managed option, where you retain control of the VM and the patching cycle
• Autonomous Database – self-patching and self-tuning, and the service most often referenced in the multicloud domains
• HeatWave – the MySQL analytics engine, included here because it is offered as a multicloud service too

How Much Networking Is in the Connectivity Domain?

Enough to matter, and it splits three ways. You configure general OCI connectivity through Site-to-Site VPN and FastConnect, then implement Oracle Interconnect for Azure and Oracle Interconnect for Google Cloud as named, separate objectives. Twenty percent of the paper depends on knowing which of those three paths a given scenario calls for.

The distinction the exam keeps returning to is between a general-purpose private circuit and a purpose-built interconnect. FastConnect gives you a dedicated link into OCI from anywhere. The Interconnect products are pre-provisioned partnerships that pair an OCI region with a specific partner-cloud region, which removes the circuit ordering work but constrains where you can land.

Where scenario questions bite

1. A workload needs a private path and the two cloud regions are paired. The Interconnect is the right answer, and choosing FastConnect costs you the mark.
2. The regions are not paired. FastConnect through a partner is the answer, and reaching for the Interconnect is wrong.
3. The requirement is low volume, tolerant of internet transit, and cost-sensitive. Site-to-Site VPN is correct even though it is the least impressive option.

What Is Oracle Database@Azure, and Why Is It Worth 30 Percent?

Oracle Database@Azure places Oracle-managed database hardware physically inside Microsoft Azure datacentres, so an Azure application reaches an Oracle Exadata or Autonomous Database at local network latency. Microsoft documents it as a service bought through the Azure Marketplace and operated by Oracle. It is the single heaviest domain on 1Z0-1151-25 at 30 percent, roughly 15 questions.

Three objectives sit under it, and they map to the lifecycle of a real deployment: explain the architecture and onboarding, provision the service, and configure high availability and disaster recovery. The onboarding half is where the marks hide, because it is procedural rather than technical.

“For the first time, the AI and converged database capabilities of Oracle Database 23ai as well as all the automation and tools of Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Exadata Database Service are fully integrated with Google Cloud. This new service combines all of the benefits of OCI database services with Google Cloud services for a seamless multicloud experience, which was unthinkable in the cloud space just a few years ago.”

The onboarding chain candidates underestimate

Getting to a running database involves linking an Azure subscription to an OCI tenancy, accepting the marketplace offer, delegating a subnet, and establishing the identity mapping between the two clouds. Every one of those steps has a failure mode, and failure modes are exactly what a scenario question is built from. Read the architecture in Microsoft’s own documentation as well as Oracle’s, because the exam describes both sides of the boundary.

High availability across a boundary

Disaster recovery design is the third objective and the one that separates a professional-level answer from an associate-level one. The question is rarely which technology to use. It is where the standby belongs, what the failover does to the Azure-side application, and which parts of the configuration survive a region loss.

How Does the Google Cloud Half Differ From the Azure Half?

Structurally it is the same idea and ten points lighter. Oracle Database@Google Cloud is worth 20 percent against Azure’s 30, and its three objectives cover architecture, onboarding and configuration, then provisioning and managing resources. The difference the exam cares about is the operational surface: Google Cloud’s console, its project and IAM model, and its own private connectivity.

Do not assume the Azure knowledge transfers cleanly. The two services were built with the same intent but different partner platforms, and the exam tests the partner-side detail. Where Azure uses subscriptions and delegated subnets, Google Cloud uses projects and its own networking constructs, and a question will name the right one.

“Oracle and Google Cloud have extended their multicloud strategy with this partnership, and customers can now take advantage of the automation in Oracle Autonomous Database and the performance of Exadata on OCI running in Google datacenters. As a result, customers can combine data from Oracle databases with Google Cloud services like Gemini foundation models and the Vertex AI development platform to develop and run a new generation of cloud native applications.”

One notable asymmetry: the Azure domain names high availability and disaster recovery as its own objective, and the Google Cloud domain does not. Resilience questions on the Google side arrive folded into resource management instead, so they are easy to miss when you revise by objective title. Google’s Oracle Database documentation is the reference for that platform-side detail.

Should You Sit the Associate Exam First?

Not necessarily. Oracle offers a multicloud architect credential at associate level as well, and search data shows candidates comparing the two before booking. The professional exam does not list the associate as a prerequisite, so the decision comes down to whether you already hold working knowledge of OCI identity, networking and database services.

If you do, go straight to 1Z0-1151-25. The 20 percent Core OCI Services domain is the only part the associate would prepare you for, and you already have it. If OCI itself is new to you, the professional paper will punish that gap in a way no amount of multicloud reading fixes.

A useful self-test

Ask yourself whether you could federate an OCI Identity Domain with an external provider without documentation open, and whether you could explain the difference between a Base Database and an Autonomous Database to a colleague. Two confident yeses mean the professional exam is the right target. The OCI Networking Professional guide covers the VCN territory this exam assumes rather than teaches.

How Should You Prepare for a 68 Percent Cut Score?

Weight your study to match the paper. Half of 1Z0-1151-25 is Oracle Database@Azure and Oracle Database@Google Cloud, so half your preparation belongs there, and most of that should be spent inside the consoles rather than reading about them. The conceptual domain needs one careful pass and no more.

1. Read the Introduction to Multicloud objectives once and move on. Five questions do not justify more.
2. Audit your Core OCI knowledge against the three named areas: identity federation, VCN components, and the three database services. Close any gap here first, because everything later assumes it.
3. Build a Site-to-Site VPN and read the FastConnect provisioning flow end to end, so the connectivity choices become instinct rather than recall.
4. Walk the full Oracle Database@Azure onboarding chain in a trial subscription, including the subscription linkage and subnet delegation, because the procedural steps are where the 30 percent domain scores you.
5. Repeat the same walkthrough on Google Cloud, paying attention to what is different rather than what is the same, since the exam tests the partner-side detail.
6. Finish on disaster recovery design across a cloud boundary, which is the highest-value single objective on the paper and the one most often skipped.

Database performance knowledge pays off in the Core OCI domain too, since administering Autonomous and Base Database services is an examined objective rather than background. The Oracle database tuning walkthrough covers that ground at a useful depth.

Which Roles Does This Credential Actually Serve?

Cloud architects, database architects and platform engineers at organisations running Oracle databases alongside Azure or Google Cloud workloads. The credential is narrow by design. It does not make you an Azure architect or a Google Cloud architect, and it is not a general Oracle Cloud credential either. It certifies the seam between them.

That narrowness is the point. Multicloud, as the industry defines it, means using services from more than one public cloud provider in a single architecture, and the shortage is in people who can operate the join rather than either side alone. The concept is covered well in the multicloud reference overview if you want the vendor-neutral framing that domain 1 expects.

Where it fits in a certification path

It sits alongside the other OCI professional credentials rather than above them. Someone holding the networking or architect professional certification adds genuinely new coverage with this one. Someone holding no OCI certification at all should treat it as a specialisation to reach for second, not first.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many questions are on the 1Z0-1151-25 exam?

Fifty, with a 90 minute limit. That is 108 seconds per question, which is generous for an Oracle professional paper and reflects the scenario style rather than straight recall.

What is the passing score for 1Z0-1151-25?

Sixty-eight percent, which means 34 of the 50 questions correct. You can afford to lose 16, but the Azure domain alone accounts for roughly 15 of them, so it cannot be skipped.

How much does the OCI Multicloud Architect Professional exam cost?

USD $245, with the price varying by country and local currency. That is standard for an Oracle professional-level certification exam.

Which domain carries the most marks?

Implement Oracle Database@Azure at 30 percent. Core OCI Services, Configure Multicloud Connection Options and Implement Oracle Database@Google Cloud each carry 20 percent, and Introduction to Multicloud carries 10.

Do you need Azure or Google Cloud experience to pass?

Some familiarity helps, because half the syllabus involves working inside those consoles. You are not tested on Azure or Google Cloud services generally, only on the Oracle database services running within them.

What is the difference between FastConnect and Oracle Interconnect?

FastConnect is a general dedicated connection into OCI from any location. Oracle Interconnect is a pre-provisioned partnership pairing specific OCI and partner-cloud regions, which removes circuit ordering but limits where you can land.

Is the associate multicloud exam a prerequisite?

No. The professional exam lists no prerequisite. The associate is worth taking first only if Oracle Cloud Infrastructure itself is unfamiliar, since 20 percent of the professional paper assumes that baseline.

Does the exam cover HeatWave?

Yes. HeatWave is named alongside Base Databases and Autonomous Databases in the Core OCI Services domain, so the MySQL analytics service is examinable rather than optional background.

How long does preparation usually take?

For an engineer already fluent in OCI, several weeks of console time across both partner clouds is realistic. Without that OCI baseline, expect considerably longer, because the Core OCI domain is assumed rather than taught.

Is Oracle Database@Azure the same as running Oracle on an Azure VM?

No. It is Oracle-managed database hardware sited inside Azure datacentres and bought through the Azure Marketplace, not a database you install and operate yourself on a virtual machine.

Conclusion

1Z0-1151-25 is a narrow, practical credential that certifies one specific competence: running Oracle database services inside somebody else’s cloud and connecting them properly. Half its marks live in the two partner-cloud domains, a fifth assumes Core OCI knowledge it never teaches, and only a tenth rewards concepts.

Prepare it in the consoles rather than on paper, give the Azure domain the largest share of your time, and treat the Google Cloud material as a separate platform rather than a variation on the same theme. When the onboarding chains feel routine and the connectivity choices arrive without hesitation, check your judgement against the money site’s scenario questions before booking the 90 minutes.

What Is the Oracle FCCM Certification?

1Z0-1142 leads to the Oracle Financial Crime and Compliance Management Certified Applications Professional credential. It tests the installation and configuration of Oracle’s financial crime platform across ten topics, covering Behaviour Detection, Enterprise Case Management, Know Your Customer, Sanctions, Enterprise Data Quality, Scenario Manager and Compliance Regulatory Reporting. The paper runs 50 questions in 90 minutes at 68 percent to pass.

Oracle sells financial crime and compliance as a portfolio rather than a single product. Transaction monitoring, customer screening, KYC, case management and regulatory reporting are separate applications sitting on a shared platform, and the Oracle financial crime portfolio is documented that way. The exam mirrors that structure exactly, which is why four of its topics are separate installation exercises rather than one.

What the credential signals to an employer is narrow and useful: this person can stand the platform up and wire it together. It says nothing about whether they can write a suspicious activity report, and it does not pretend to.

Is 1Z0-1142 an AML Exam or an Installation Exam?

It is an installation and configuration exam. Seven of the ten topics are named Installing or Configuring something, and the objectives underneath them describe file-level work: setting up XML files, executing them, running the schema-creator utility, defining EDQ parameters and configuring application servers. Anti-money-laundering concepts appear only as the context those components operate in.

Read a single objective and the point lands. Under Installing Sanctions, the four tasks are explaining the prerequisites, setting up XML and other Sanctions files, executing the Sanctions files, and executing the schema-creator utility. There is nothing there about sanctions policy, list quality or false-positive tuning as a compliance discipline. It is deployment.

This has a blunt consequence for study planning. Reading about typologies will not move your score. Standing up an FCCM environment, breaking it, and standing it up again will.

Where the compliance knowledge does matter

It matters for comprehension rather than for marks. You cannot configure Scenario Manager sensibly without knowing what a scenario is meant to detect, and you cannot define KYC batches without understanding why customer risk is periodically re-scored. Domain knowledge makes the configuration make sense, but the questions are about the configuration. A working grasp of the regulatory idea behind customer due diligence is enough context for the KYC topic.

What Do the Four Installation Topics Cover?

Four of the ten topics are installation work: Behaviour Detection, Enterprise Case Management and Sanctions, which are titled Installing, plus Compliance Regulatory Reporting, which is titled Configuring but runs through the same file-level steps. All four follow an identical four-step shape, which is the single most useful pattern in the whole syllabus. Learn the shape once and three quarters of the installation content becomes recognition rather than memory.

The pattern runs: explain the prerequisites, set up the XML and other component files, execute those files, then configure the application and server. Behaviour Detection, Enterprise Case Management and Compliance Regulatory Reporting all state it in those words. Sanctions varies the last step, replacing server configuration with executing the schema-creator utility.

• Behaviour Detection is the transaction monitoring engine, so its prerequisites are the heaviest of the four
• Enterprise Case Management appears twice in the syllabus, once as an installation and again as a configuration topic, which is a strong signal about where the questions concentrate
• Sanctions is the odd one out because of the schema-creator step, and that difference is exactly the kind of detail a 50-question paper likes
• Compliance Regulatory Reporting closes the loop, turning cases into filings

If you have installed one of these on a real environment, you have effectively rehearsed all four. If you have installed none of them, no amount of reading will substitute, because the questions ask about prerequisites and execution order rather than about concepts.

How Much of the Exam Is Configuration Rather Than Installation?

Three topics are pure configuration: Configuring Enterprise Case Management, the Process Monitoring Framework, and Configuring Scenario Manager. Together with the configuration steps inside the installation topics and the EDQ topic, configuration work accounts for more of the syllabus than installation does. It is also where the exam gets genuinely difficult.

Enterprise Case Management gets a second topic to itself

Configuring ECM has just two objectives, explaining the prerequisites and configuring the application and server, but the fact that Oracle gave it a separate topic rather than folding it into the installation tells you it carries weight. Treat the two ECM topics as one large block when you plan.

The Process Monitoring Framework is the workflow topic

This is the most conceptually distinct topic on the paper. Its three objectives are defining statuses and user actions at the backend, defining human tasks, sequences, statuses and rules within Process Modeller, and connecting human tasks for actions on transaction lines. That is case workflow design, and it is the only place the syllabus asks you to model how people work rather than how data moves.

Scenario Manager is where detection logic is built

Two objectives, both dense: creating data source and rule based scenarios, and configuring threshold linking, creating jobs and executing scenarios. Threshold linking in particular is the mechanism that lets one scenario be tuned differently for different customer segments, and it is the sort of specific named feature that makes good exam material.

What Does the KYC Topic Actually Ask For?

Setting up Know Your Customer is the largest single topic by objective count, with six tasks: explaining the prerequisites, configuring Data Ingestion, managing Security Attribute Configuration, using Excel Upload, configuring the KYC application and server, and defining KYC Batches. None of them is about customer risk methodology. All six are platform tasks.

Two of those objectives are worth flagging because candidates routinely skip them. Security Attribute Configuration governs which users can see which customer records, and it is the control that keeps a KYC deployment compliant with internal information barriers. Excel Upload sounds trivial and is not; it is the supported route for bulk reference data, and knowing when it is appropriate rather than Data Ingestion is a real distinction.

KYC Batches close the topic. Periodic re-screening is batch work, and defining those batches correctly is what makes the difference between a KYC deployment that re-scores customers on schedule and one that quietly stops.

Why Does Sanctions Screening Depend on Enterprise Data Quality?

Because sanctions screening is a name-matching problem, and name matching is a data quality problem. Oracle splits this across two topics: Installing Sanctions, and Configuring Enterprise Data Quality for Sanctions. The EDQ topic has three objectives: setting up EDQ integration for customer screening and transaction filtering, defining the EDQ parameters, and executing EDQ jobs.

The phrase to notice is “customer screening and transaction filtering”. Those are two different screening jobs against the same lists, one running over the customer base and one running over payment traffic, and EDQ is the component doing the matching in both. Understand that split and the topic stops feeling like an unrelated bolt-on.

EDQ parameters are where tuning happens. Matching thresholds decide how much transliteration, abbreviation and spelling variance a screening engine tolerates, and that setting is the difference between missing a hit and drowning an operations team in false positives. Oracle’s FCCM documentation library is organised per application, which makes it the practical reference while you work through this topic.

What Does Understanding the FCCM Architecture Mean in Practice?

Topic ten asks you to explain the architecture prerequisites, ingest data, configure staging and data quality, configure the compliance engine and event generation, and integrate third party systems and case creation. Read in order, those five objectives describe the path a single transaction takes through the platform from arrival to a case landing on an analyst’s desk.

That path is the mental model the rest of the syllabus hangs from. Data arrives and is ingested. It lands in staging and is cleaned. The compliance engine evaluates it and generates events. Events, plus anything arriving from third party systems, become cases. Everything you installed in topics one to nine sits somewhere on that line.

Candidates who learn this topic last usually find the earlier ones harder than they needed to be. Learning it first turns ten disconnected installations into one system with parts. It is the cheapest reordering available in this syllabus.

What Does 1Z0-1142 Cost and What Score Do You Need?

1Z0-1142 costs USD $245 and requires 68 percent to pass, which is 34 correct answers out of 50. The paper runs for 90 minutes, giving you an average of 108 seconds per question. Oracle notes that pricing may vary by country or by localized currency, so check the figure for your region at booking.

The absence of weightings is the unusual part and it changes how you plan. On most Oracle exams you can rank topics by percentage and allocate study time accordingly. Here you cannot, so the only sensible proxy is objective count: KYC has six, the FCCM architecture and the four installation topics have four or five each, and Configuring ECM, EDQ, Scenario Manager and the Process Monitoring Framework have two or three.

Treat that as a rough guide rather than a blueprint. Ten topics across 50 questions averages five questions per topic, and a topic with two objectives can still produce a question you have never thought about.

Who Should Take This Certification?

1Z0-1142 fits people who deploy and configure Oracle Financial Services applications: implementation consultants, OFSAA platform engineers, and the internal administrators who keep a bank’s AML stack running. It does not fit compliance analysts, investigators or reporting officers, whose work the exam never touches.

The clearest test is a single question. Have you ever opened an FCCM configuration file? If yes, this credential validates something you already do and the preparation is mostly systematisation. If no, you would be learning a large platform from scratch in order to sit an exam about it, which is a poor trade unless the platform is arriving in your organisation anyway.

On career value, the credential sits in a narrow but well-paid corner. Compliance platform work pays above general application administration because the domain is regulated and the talent pool is small, and current benchmarks for compliance role compensation give a reasonable floor to reason from before adding a platform speciality on top.

For a sense of how Oracle structures its other implementation professional credentials, the Narrative Reporting implementation track follows a similar install-and-configure pattern in the reporting space, and the wider Oracle certification archive covers the rest of the family.

How Should You Prepare Without a Weighted Blueprint?

Without weightings, sequence beats allocation. Start with the architecture topic so the other nine have somewhere to attach, then work the installation topics as one pattern rather than four separate exercises, then spend the bulk of your remaining time on configuration, which is both larger and harder than the installs.

1. Start with Understanding the FCCM Architecture, tracing a single transaction from ingestion through staging, the compliance engine and event generation to case creation, because every other topic sits somewhere on that path.
2. Learn the four-step installation pattern once, using Behaviour Detection as the worked example, then confirm that Enterprise Case Management and Compliance Regulatory Reporting follow the same shape.
3. Note the one exception deliberately, since Installing Sanctions replaces server configuration with the schema-creator utility and that difference is exactly the sort of detail a short paper tests.
4. Move to Setting up Know Your Customer next, treating its six objectives as the largest single block on the syllabus and paying particular attention to Security Attribute Configuration and KYC Batches.
5. Take the configuration topics together, working Configuring Enterprise Case Management, the Process Monitoring Framework and Configuring Scenario Manager in one continuous block so the workflow and detection logic reinforce each other.
6. Cover Configuring Enterprise Data Quality for Sanctions immediately after Scenario Manager, because both are about tuning thresholds and the mental model transfers directly.
7. Finish by sitting timed papers at 50 questions in 90 minutes, keeping any single question under two minutes so an unfamiliar prerequisite cannot cost you the ones you know.

One warning about resources. Oracle’s own certification pages are frequently unavailable to anything other than a signed-in browser, so build your preparation around the product documentation and a live environment rather than around a catalogue page you may not be able to open. Testing yourself against a realistic 1Z0-1142 sample question set is the fastest way to find out whether your grasp of the install order is real or remembered.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many questions are on the 1Z0-1142 exam?

The exam contains 50 questions and runs for 90 minutes. That works out at roughly 108 seconds per question, which is generous for a recall item and tight for one that asks about installation prerequisites in order.

What score do you need to pass 1Z0-1142?

The passing score is 68 percent, meaning 34 correct answers out of 50. With ten topics and no published weightings, you cannot safely write off any single topic and still reach that mark.

How much does the Oracle FCCM certification cost?

USD $245. Oracle notes that pricing may vary by country or by localized currency, so confirm the figure for your region before booking rather than assuming the dollar price applies.

Is 1Z0-1142 about anti-money-laundering theory?

No. Seven of the ten topics are named Installing or Configuring, and the objectives describe XML file setup, executing component files, running the schema-creator utility and configuring application servers. AML concepts are context, not content.

Which topic has the most objectives?

Setting up Know Your Customer, with six: prerequisites, Data Ingestion, Security Attribute Configuration, Excel Upload, application and server configuration, and defining KYC Batches. Objective count is the closest thing to a weighting this syllabus offers.

Does the exam publish domain weightings?

No. The syllabus lists ten topics with their objectives but assigns no percentages. Plan by sequence and objective count instead, and do not assume any topic is small enough to skip.

What is the Process Monitoring Framework topic about?

Case workflow. It asks you to define statuses and user actions at the backend, define human tasks, sequences, statuses and rules in Process Modeller, and connect human tasks to actions on transaction lines. It is the only topic that models how people work.

Why is Enterprise Data Quality part of a financial crime exam?

Because sanctions screening is name matching, and name matching depends on data quality. EDQ performs the matching for both customer screening and transaction filtering, and its parameters set how much spelling and transliteration variance the platform tolerates.

Who is this certification aimed at?

Implementation consultants, OFSAA platform engineers and internal administrators who deploy and configure Oracle Financial Services applications. Compliance analysts and investigators will find that the syllabus never reaches their work.

Can you pass without hands-on FCCM experience?

It would be difficult. The questions concentrate on prerequisites, execution order and configuration specifics, which are exactly the details that stick from doing the work and slide off when only read about.

Conclusion

Read the title of this credential and you expect a compliance exam. Read the syllabus and you find a deployment exam with ten topics, seven of which name installation or configuration outright. That single correction is worth more than any study schedule, because it tells you whether the $245 buys validation of work you already do or an expensive introduction to a platform you have never touched. Learn the architecture first so the other nine topics have somewhere to sit, treat the four installations as one repeated pattern, and give the configuration topics the time their difficulty deserves. Then test your recall of the install order against realistic questions before you book.

What Is Oracle AI Vector Search?

It is Oracle Database’s ability to query data by meaning instead of by matching text. Oracle’s documentation puts it directly: AI Vector Search is designed for AI workloads and allows you to query data based on semantics rather than keywords. Rather than bolting on a separate vector database, Oracle stores embeddings in the same tables as the business data they describe.

That design decision is the reason this exam exists, and it shapes almost every question on it. When embeddings live beside the rows they came from, a semantic search is just a query, subject to the same transactions, the same security, and the same backup story as everything else in the database.

The practical shape of it is simple enough to state. Unstructured content, whether documents, images, or audio, is converted into a numeric representation. Similar meanings produce numerically close representations. Searching then means finding the closest vectors rather than the matching strings.

What Does the 1Z0-184-25 Exam Cover?

1Z0-184-25 is a 50 question exam with 90 minutes on the clock and a 68% pass mark, which works out at 34 correct answers. It costs $245 USD, though Oracle notes pricing varies by country and local currency. The syllabus splits into six weighted sections, and building a RAG application is the largest at 25%. Working through 1Z0-184-25 sample questions early is the fastest way to see which of the six your background already covers.

Format, cost, and scoring

How the six sections are weighted

A 68% pass mark is demanding for a 50 question paper. You can lose sixteen questions, and the three fifteen percent sections are close enough in weight that neglecting any one of them puts real pressure on the rest.

Registration is worth a note. Although Oracle exams appear on Pearson VUE, the Pearson VUE Oracle page states that English-language Oracle exams are managed directly by Oracle through MyLearn, so that is where scheduling actually happens.

How Does the VECTOR Data Type Work?

The VECTOR data type stores an embedding as a first-class database column, so a table can hold the original text and its numeric representation side by side. Vector fundamentals is worth 20% of 1Z0-184-25 and covers the data type itself, distance functions and metrics, and both DML and DDL operations on vectors.

Distance is the whole idea

A vector on its own means nothing. It only becomes useful when compared against another vector, which is what distance functions do. Oracle supports several metrics, with cosine as the default, and the exam expects you to know that the metric you search with should match the one the embedding model was designed around.

Vectors behave like data

Because vectors are ordinary columns, the usual operations apply. You can insert, update, and delete them, and you can define and alter tables that contain them. The Oracle AI Vector Search guide shows how plainly this works, with a vector column declared alongside a document identifier and its text.

Candidates from a pure machine learning background often underestimate this section, because handling vectors as ordinary relational data is exactly the part their usual tooling hides from them. The same is true in reverse on the Oracle data science certification, where modelling is a small share and the platform around it carries most of the questions.

Why Is Building a RAG Application 25% of the Exam?

Because retrieval-augmented generation is the reason most organisations want vector search in the first place. At 25%, building a RAG application is the largest section of 1Z0-184-25, and it requires you to do it two ways: in PL/SQL and in Python. Concepts alone will not carry this section.

RAG is a technique for grounding a language model’s answer in retrieved documents rather than relying only on what the model absorbed during training, which reduces invented answers and lets responses cite a source. The pattern the exam cares about runs in a predictable order:

1. Split source content into chunks small enough to retrieve meaningfully
2. Generate an embedding for each chunk and store it in the database
3. Embed the user’s question using the same model
4. Run a similarity search to retrieve the closest chunks
5. Pass those chunks to the language model as context alongside the question

Two things reliably separate candidates here. The first is understanding why the question and the documents must be embedded with the same model. The second is being genuinely comfortable in both languages, since a PL/SQL specialist and a Python developer each tend to have prepared only half of what this section asks. If you want a broader sense of the concept beyond Oracle’s implementation, the retrieval-augmented generation overview is a reasonable starting point.

HNSW or IVF: Which Vector Index Does the Exam Expect?

Both, and knowing when each applies. Using vector indexes is worth 15% and performing similarity search another 15%, so together they are 30% of the paper. The two index types answer the same question with different trade-offs, and Oracle documents them as distinct categories.

The similarity search section then covers exact search, approximate search using those indexes, and multi-vector search across several documents. The distinction that matters is that an exact search visits every vector, while an approximate search deliberately looks at fewer in exchange for speed.

One detail from the vector index documentation is worth memorising: if you query using a different distance function from the one the index was built with, the database falls back to an exact search instead. That is precisely the kind of behaviour an exam question is built around.

Where Should Vector Embeddings Be Generated?

Either inside the database or outside it, and the exam covers both. Using vector embeddings is worth 15% of 1Z0-184-25 and splits three ways: generating embeddings outside Oracle, generating them inside Oracle, and storing them in the database. The choice is an architectural one with real consequences.

Generating embeddings inside the database keeps data where it already sits, which matters when the content is sensitive or when moving it would be slow. Generating them outside gives access to a wider range of models and offloads the compute. The exam expects you to recognise which situation favours which approach.

The constant across both routes is consistency. Whatever produces the embeddings for your stored content must also produce the embedding for the incoming query, because vectors from different models are not comparable. That single rule explains a surprising number of exam answers.

What Are the Related AI Capabilities Worth 10%?

The smallest section covers four distinct features: Exadata AI Storage for accelerating vector search, Select AI with Autonomous Database for querying data using natural language prompts, SQL Loader for loading vector data, and Oracle Data Pump for loading and unloading it. At 10%, that is roughly five questions across four topics.

Two of these are about getting vector data in and out at scale, and two are about the surrounding Oracle platform. Because the section is broad but shallow, the efficient approach is to learn what each feature is for rather than how to configure it in depth:

• Exadata AI Storage accelerates vector search through the storage layer
• Select AI lets a user pose a natural language question against Autonomous Database
• SQL Loader handles bulk loading of vector data
• Data Pump moves vector data both into and out of the database

Candidates who work only with on-premises Oracle should give Select AI and Exadata AI Storage a deliberate read, since neither is likely to appear in their day job.

How Should a DBA and a Developer Prepare Differently?

They should start at opposite ends of the syllabus. A database administrator already understands the data type, DDL and DML, and index behaviour, so their gap is the 25% RAG section and the Python half of it. A Python developer usually knows embeddings and RAG well but has never created a vector index or written the PL/SQL version.

A sequence that suits both, adjusted for where you start:

1. Build one small end-to-end RAG application first, since it is the largest section and it touches five of the six others
2. Write it a second time in the language you are weaker in, PL/SQL or Python
3. Create both an HNSW and an IVF index over the same data and compare the behaviour
4. Run an exact search and an approximate search over that data and note the difference
5. Generate embeddings both inside and outside the database so the trade-off is concrete
6. Read through the related AI capabilities once, aiming for recognition rather than depth

If your background is administration rather than AI, the Oracle performance tuning material covers adjacent database ground, while the OCI networking professional route shows how Oracle structures its other professional-level exams.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many questions are on the 1Z0-184-25 exam?

The exam has 50 questions with a 90 minute limit, giving you a little under two minutes each. The pressure comes from the breadth of the six sections rather than from the clock itself.

What is the passing score for Oracle AI Vector Search Professional?

You need 68%, which is 34 correct answers out of 50. That is a relatively high bar, and because four sections carry 15% or more, neglecting any one of them makes the target considerably harder to reach. Developers building on OCI often pair this with the OCI DevOps credential, which covers pipelines and observability.

How much does the exam cost?

The exam costs $245 USD, and Oracle notes that pricing may vary by country or in localised currency. Check the price in your own region when you book rather than assuming the dollar figure applies. Oracle prices most of its specialist exams in the same band, and the 1Z0-1142 exam details sets out the fee and format for the financial crime and compliance track.

Which section carries the most weight?

Building a RAG application, at 25%. It covers RAG concepts plus creating an application in both PL/SQL and Python, which makes it the largest and, for many database specialists, the least familiar part of the exam. Teams putting sensitive data behind vector search should also read the database security exam breakdown.

Do you need to know Python for this certification?

Yes. The syllabus explicitly requires creating a RAG application using Python as well as PL/SQL. A candidate comfortable in only one of the two languages has a genuine gap in the exam’s largest section.

What is the difference between HNSW and IVF indexes?

HNSW is an in-memory neighbour graph index that navigates layered connections and is optimised for speed. IVF is a partition index that groups vectors into clusters and restricts searching to the nearest ones, balancing quality against speed.

When does Oracle fall back to an exact search?

If you query using a different distance function from the one the vector index was created with, the database performs an exact match search instead of using the index. Matching the metric to the index is therefore essential for performance.

Should embeddings be generated inside or outside the database?

Both approaches are examinable. Generating inside keeps sensitive or bulky data in place, while generating outside opens up a wider choice of models. What matters is using the same model for stored content and incoming queries.

Are there prerequisites for 1Z0-184-25?

No prerequisites are published. The exam does assume working familiarity with Oracle Database alongside basic Python and AI concepts, so candidates strong in only one of those areas should plan extra preparation time.

Where do you schedule the exam?

Although Oracle exams appear in Pearson VUE’s catalogue, Pearson VUE states that Oracle exams delivered in English are managed directly by Oracle. Scheduling therefore runs through Oracle MyLearn rather than the Pearson VUE portal.

Conclusion

1Z0-184-25 certifies something genuinely new: the ability to run semantic search and a grounded generative application inside the database rather than alongside it. With RAG at 25% and vector fundamentals at 20%, the exam splits its weight between applied AI work and classic Oracle data handling, which is why candidates from either background have real preparation to do.

Build one RAG application end to end before anything else, then write it again in whichever of PL/SQL or Python you find harder. Create both index types over the same data so the HNSW and IVF trade-off is something you have seen rather than read. Then work timed questions across all six sections until the 68% pass mark stops looking tight.

What Does the Oracle Database SQL Certification Validate?

The Oracle Database SQL certification, earned through exam 1Z0-071, validates that a candidate can write and interpret SQL against an Oracle database with accuracy and confidence. It confirms working command of data retrieval, filtering, sorting, joins, single-row and group functions, subqueries, DML, and core DDL, proving practical fluency rather than theoretical familiarity with relational concepts.

Oracle positions this credential as a foundation qualification that also counts toward higher associate and professional tracks. Because SQL is a declarative language built on the relational model, the exam expects you to understand how tables, columns, and rows relate, and how a single statement can act on many records at once. The Oracle Database concepts documentation frames these fundamentals, and 1Z0-071 turns that theory into testable, hands-on skill.

The credential appeals to a broad audience: application developers, database administrators early in their careers, business intelligence analysts, and anyone whose work depends on querying Oracle data directly. Passing signals to employers that you can be trusted with production queries without introducing costly logic errors.

What Are the Oracle 1Z0-071 Exam Details and Syllabus?

The Oracle 1Z0-071 exam is a proctored, multiple-choice test of 63 questions with a 120-minute time limit and a required passing score of 63 percent. The registration fee is USD 245, and the exam is titled Oracle Database SQL. The specifications below are the figures you register and prepare against, so confirm them before booking a seat.

The syllabus spans sixteen topic areas that together cover the full lifecycle of querying and shaping data. Study each area on a live Oracle instance rather than reading alone, and use a focused question bank such as the Oracle Database SQL page to rehearse under timed conditions. The official topics are listed verbatim below.

How Do SELECT Statements and Joins Work on the 1Z0-071 Exam?

SELECT-based retrieval is the heart of the 1Z0-071 exam, drawing on the syllabus areas for retrieving, restricting, and sorting data as well as displaying data from multiple tables. Expect questions that ask you to predict output, spot a syntax error, or choose the clause that produces a required result set across joined tables. Precision with clause order matters as much as knowing the keywords.

The exam tests the logical order in which clauses execute, which differs from the order you write them. A strong candidate can trace a statement from the FROM clause through WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING, and ORDER BY and explain what each stage filters or reshapes.

Join Types You Must Recognise

• Inner joins that return only matching rows across tables
• Left, right, and full outer joins that preserve unmatched rows from one or both sides
• Cross joins that produce a Cartesian product
• Self joins that relate a table to itself, common in hierarchies
• Natural joins and USING clauses that join on identically named columns

You should be equally comfortable with older Oracle join syntax and the ANSI-standard JOIN keywords, because questions can present either. Oracle’s SQL Language Reference documents every join form and clause, and reviewing it clears up the edge cases the exam loves to probe, such as how NULLs behave in outer joins and how ambiguous column names must be qualified.

What DML and DDL Skills Does the 1Z0-071 Exam Test?

Beyond querying, the 1Z0-071 exam confirms you can change data and structure. The Managing Tables using DML statements topic and the Use DDL to manage tables and their relationships topic mean you must handle INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, and MERGE alongside CREATE, ALTER, DROP, and TRUNCATE. Questions frequently combine both, checking whether you understand how transactions and definitions interact.

Data Manipulation Language

DML questions test row-level changes and the transaction control that surrounds them. You need to know how COMMIT and ROLLBACK bound a transaction, how a savepoint lets you undo part of one, and how MERGE performs a conditional insert-or-update in a single pass. Watch for questions where an implicit commit from a DDL statement ends an open transaction unexpectedly.

Data Definition Language

DDL questions cover creating and altering tables, choosing correct data types, and managing related objects. The syllabus explicitly includes indexes, synonyms, and sequences, so expect items on how a sequence generates values, why a synonym simplifies object references, and when an index helps or hurts. Oracle’s SQL Quick Reference is a compact way to drill the exact statement syntax these questions demand.

How Are Constraints and Views Assessed in 1Z0-071?

Constraints and views appear across several 1Z0-071 topics, including Use DDL to manage tables and their relationships, Managing Views, and Controlling User Access. The exam checks whether you can enforce data integrity through constraints and whether you can build views that present or restrict data cleanly. These are the mechanisms that keep an Oracle schema trustworthy as it grows.

Constraint Types on the Exam

1. PRIMARY KEY to uniquely identify each row
2. FOREIGN KEY to enforce referential integrity between tables
3. UNIQUE to prevent duplicate values in a column
4. NOT NULL to require a value
5. CHECK to validate values against a condition

You should know how to add, disable, and enable constraints, and how a foreign key reacts when a referenced row is deleted. For views, the exam expects you to create simple and complex views, understand which views permit DML, and use views together with the Controlling User Access topic to grant and revoke privileges. Together these topics prove you can protect data as well as query it.

What Should You Know About Subqueries and SET Operators?

Subqueries and SET operators are two of the more challenging 1Z0-071 areas, mapping to the Using Subqueries to Solve Queries and Using SET Operators topics. They reward candidates who think in sets rather than loops. Expect nested queries feeding a WHERE or FROM clause, correlated subqueries that reference the outer query, and combinations of result sets through UNION, INTERSECT, and MINUS.

Subquery Patterns

• Single-row subqueries that return one value for comparison operators
• Multiple-row subqueries used with IN, ANY, and ALL
• Correlated subqueries evaluated once per outer row
• Inline views that place a subquery in the FROM clause
• EXISTS and NOT EXISTS checks for related rows

SET Operator Rules

SET operators combine the results of two queries that must share column count and compatible data types. UNION removes duplicates while UNION ALL keeps them, INTERSECT returns common rows, and MINUS returns rows in the first query only. A frequent trap is forgetting that the final ORDER BY applies to the combined result, not to each branch. Practising these operators against sample data builds the pattern recognition the exam rewards.

How Should You Prepare for the Oracle Database SQL Certification?

Effective preparation for the Oracle Database SQL certification pairs consistent hands-on practice with structured review of all sixteen syllabus topics. Because 1Z0-071 rewards accuracy under time pressure, the most reliable plan is to write real queries daily on a live Oracle instance, then rehearse with timed question sets until you can finish comfortably inside the 120-minute limit.

A Practical Study Sequence

1. Install Oracle Database Express Edition or use a free cloud instance to practise every statement type.
2. Work through the syllabus in order, from relational concepts and SELECT retrieval to time-zone handling.
3. Build small schemas so you can test joins, constraints, views, and subqueries against your own data.
4. Take full-length timed practice exams and review every incorrect answer until the reason is clear.
5. Revisit weak topics in the final week rather than re-reading material you already know.

Candidates moving toward administration often follow this credential with database-focused exams, and studying alongside broader database-administration material helps you see where SQL skills feed into wider DBA work. Treat practice questions as diagnostics: each miss points to a topic to reinforce, not just a score to record.

What Career Paths Follow the 1Z0-071 Certification?

The Oracle Database SQL certification opens roles wherever Oracle data must be queried, shaped, and reported, and it acts as a stepping stone into deeper database careers. Because SQL is a foundational, long-lived skill standardised across the industry, the 1Z0-071 credential stays relevant even as tools and platforms evolve around it. It signals immediate, verifiable competence to hiring managers.

Roles That Value This Credential

• SQL Developer writing and tuning queries for applications
• Database Administrator managing Oracle schemas and access
• Business Intelligence and Data Analyst extracting insight from relational data
• Application Developer embedding SQL in enterprise software
• Data Engineer building pipelines that draw from Oracle sources

SQL itself has a decades-long history as a standardised language, and the the SQL standard shows why the skill remains durable across employers and platforms. From this foundation, many professionals advance toward administration and performance work, and a resource on database performance tuning illustrates the natural next step once query-writing is second nature. The credential is a starting line for a data career, not a finish line.

Frequently Asked Questions About the 1Z0-071 Exam

How many questions are on the 1Z0-071 exam?

The 1Z0-071 exam contains 63 multiple-choice questions. You have 120 minutes to complete them, which averages a little under two minutes per question, so pacing and quick recognition of correct syntax both matter on exam day.

What is the passing score for Oracle 1Z0-071?

The required passing score is 63 percent. Because the margin is not large, aim to answer the topics you know quickly and accurately, leaving time to reason carefully through joins, subqueries, and SET operator questions that need more thought.

How much does the 1Z0-071 exam cost?

The exam fee is USD 245, though the price may vary by country or by localized currency. Confirm the current amount in your region when you register, since taxes and local pricing can change the final total you pay.

Is the Oracle Database SQL certification good for beginners?

Yes. The Oracle Database SQL certification is designed as a foundation credential, making it a strong first Oracle exam for developers and analysts who already write some SQL and want a recognised proof of skill against an enterprise database.

What topics does the 1Z0-071 exam cover?

The syllabus spans sixteen topics, from relational concepts, SELECT retrieval, restricting and sorting data, and single-row functions through joins, subqueries, SET operators, DML, DDL, views, user access, data dictionary views, and managing data across time zones. Once SQL is solid, the usual next specialism is the Oracle database security certification.

Do I need programming experience to pass 1Z0-071?

No prior programming language is required, but hands-on SQL practice is essential. The exam checks whether you can write and predict the output of statements, so time spent querying a live Oracle instance matters far more than general coding background.

How long should I study for the 1Z0-071 exam?

Many candidates prepare over six to eight weeks with steady daily practice, though timelines vary with prior SQL experience. Focus on hands-on repetition across all sixteen topics and timed mock exams rather than a fixed number of study hours.

Does the 1Z0-071 certification expire?

Oracle SQL fundamentals remain stable, and this credential is widely treated as a lasting proof of skill. Always check Oracle’s current certification policy for any retirement or version notes before you register, since Oracle occasionally refreshes exam versions.

What is the difference between old and ANSI join syntax on the exam?

The exam can present traditional Oracle join syntax that uses the WHERE clause and the (+) outer join operator, or ANSI-standard JOIN keywords. You should read and write both, because a single question may rely on recognising either form correctly.

Conclusion

The Oracle Database SQL certification turns everyday SQL skill into a credential employers recognise, and the 1Z0-071 exam measures exactly the abilities that matter on the job: retrieving, joining, filtering, and reshaping data accurately against an Oracle database. With 63 questions in 120 minutes and a 63 percent bar, success comes from consistent hands-on practice across all sixteen syllabus topics rather than last-minute memorisation. Build small schemas, write real queries daily, and rehearse with timed practice exams until joins, subqueries, and SET operators feel automatic. Ready to begin? Map out a study plan against the syllabus above, practise on a live Oracle instance, and book your 1Z0-071 exam once your timed scores are consistently clearing the passing mark.

What Does the Oracle 1Z0-116 Exam Cover?

The Oracle 1Z0-116 (Oracle Database Security Administration) is a 120-minute exam of 72 multiple-choice questions with a passing score of 59 percent and a fee of $245 USD. It validates the ability to secure an Oracle database across authentication, authorization, encryption, auditing, and the specialised security options that protect sensitive data.

How Is the Exam Structured?

The exam is defined by fourteen official topic areas rather than a few weighted domains, and Oracle does not publish percentage weightings. That breadth is the challenge, because questions range across the entire security feature set, from password management to Oracle Database Vault. The fourteen official topics, taken directly from the exam’s published objectives, are listed below.

Official Exam Topics

Read the full topic list on the exam datacard before studying, because its granularity signals what the exam rewards: broad, practical familiarity with Oracle’s entire security toolkit rather than deep theory in one area.

Who Should Take the Database Security Administration Certification?

The 1Z0-116 is aimed at database administrators, security administrators, and DBAs who are responsible for securing Oracle databases. It suits professionals moving from general database administration into a security-focused role, and it is a strong credential for anyone accountable for protecting sensitive data in an Oracle environment.

What Background Helps

Solid Oracle database administration experience is close to essential. The exam assumes you understand how the database works before it asks how to secure it, so comfort with SQL, users, and the general architecture is prerequisite. A grounding in core database skills such as those in the Oracle Database SQL fundamentals makes the security material much easier to absorb.

Where It Fits

The certification sits alongside Oracle’s cloud and platform security credentials, and professionals often combine on-premises and cloud security expertise. This look at how the OCI security certification shapes careers shows how database security skills extend into Oracle’s cloud, where many of the same principles apply to managed and Autonomous databases.

How Does the Exam Approach Users and Authentication?

Authentication is the first line of database defence, and the exam covers it thoroughly. It spans managing database users across authentication methods, securing passwords, and using application contexts and client identifiers to establish and control identity within the database session.

User and Password Management

The exam expects command of the full range of authentication: operating system, Kerberos, PKI certificate, and enterprise user authentication, along with centrally managed users. Password security is examined in detail, from securing passwords in scripts and applications to administering the external password store and managing the password file. Identifying and handling inactive accounts is a recurring practical concern.

Contexts and Client Identifiers

Application contexts are a distinctive Oracle security feature. Understand USERENV attributes, how client identifiers propagate identity, and how contexts support secure application roles and unified auditing. These mechanisms let the database make security decisions based on who is really behind a connection, which is central to fine-grained control.

What Authorization and Access Control Must You Master?

Authorization determines what an authenticated user can actually do, and it is one of the richest areas of the exam. It covers system and object privileges, role management, and Oracle’s advanced access control features: fine grained access control, Real Application Security, Virtual Private Database, and Oracle Label Security.

Privileges and Roles

Start with the fundamentals: system and object privileges, administrative privilege assignment, and the different kinds of roles, including secure application roles and global roles. Privilege analysis is a key modern tool the exam expects you to understand, since it reveals which privileges are actually used and supports the principle of least privilege in practice.

Fine Grained Access Control

Oracle offers several row and column level controls, and the exam expects you to distinguish them. Understand Virtual Private Database for row-level security, Oracle Label Security for classification-based access, and Real Application Security for application users. Knowing when each fits a requirement is exactly the judgement the exam tests.

What Is Oracle Database Vault and Why Does It Matter?

Oracle Database Vault addresses one of the hardest problems in database security: restricting even the powerful database administrator. It enforces separation of duties so that a DBA can manage the database without necessarily being able to read the sensitive data inside it, which is a common compliance and insider-threat requirement.

Realms, Rules, and Command Rules

The exam expects you to configure Database Vault properly. Understand realms that protect schemas and objects, factors and rule sets that make access decisions based on context, and command rules that control administrative operations. Trusted path access ties these together, ensuring that access is granted only under the right conditions.

Why Separation of Duties Is Tested

Database Vault features prominently because separation of duties is a genuine security control rather than a theoretical one. Questions describe a scenario, such as protecting sensitive data from a privileged administrator, and ask which Database Vault mechanism enforces it. This is where the exam moves from configuration into security design thinking.

How Does the Exam Test Auditing?

Auditing is the detective control that makes everything else accountable, and the exam covers Oracle’s auditing capabilities in depth. It spans auditing privileged users, standard auditing, fine-grained auditing, and configuring unified auditing, which consolidates audit data into a single secure trail.

Unified and Fine-Grained Auditing

Unified auditing is the modern approach, and the exam expects you to configure it, understand its policies, and know how it improves on legacy auditing. Fine-grained auditing adds precision, letting you audit specific conditions such as access to particular columns or rows. Together they let you record exactly what matters without drowning in noise.

Auditing the Powerful

A recurring theme is auditing privileged users, because the accounts with the most power pose the most risk. The exam expects you to understand how to hold administrators accountable through audit, complementing the preventive controls of Database Vault with a detective record of what was actually done.

What Encryption and Network Security Does It Require?

Encryption protects data when other controls are bypassed, and the exam treats it as essential. It covers encrypting data in motion and at rest, Transparent Data Encryption, key and wallet management, and securing the network layer through access control lists and listener configuration.

Transparent Data Encryption

Transparent Data Encryption is central to the encryption topics. Understand column-level and tablespace-level encryption, how the master key and wallet are managed, and the role of the SYSKM administrative privilege. The Transparent Data Encryption documentation is the authoritative reference for how key management and wallet administration work.

Network Security

The exam also covers securing the network path to the database: network access control lists, wallet access for microservice deployments, listener valid-node checking, and the SEC parameters that harden network behaviour. Data encrypted at rest still needs protection in transit, and TLS configuration is examined alongside it. Broader context is available in the Oracle Database security guide.

How Are Data Masking and Redaction Tested?

The final theme protects sensitive data from those who should not see it, even when they have legitimate access to the system. The exam covers data redaction, the Enterprise Manager data masking pack, sensitive data discovery, and the additional assessment tools that evaluate a database’s security posture.

Redaction Versus Masking

The exam expects you to distinguish two related capabilities. Data redaction alters what is displayed at query time without changing the stored data, protecting sensitive values in production. Data masking, by contrast, permanently replaces sensitive data, typically for non-production environments. Knowing which fits a use case is a common question pattern.

Assessment and Additional Topics

The syllabus closes with practical security tooling: the Database Security Assessment Tool for evaluating posture, evaluating vulnerabilities through CVE and CVSS, and security considerations for cloud and Autonomous databases. Familiarity with the CVSS scoring system helps with the vulnerability-evaluation topics, which connect database security to the wider vulnerability-management discipline.

What Careers Does the Certification Support?

The 1Z0-116 maps most directly to database security administrator, database administrator, and security engineer roles in organisations running Oracle databases. It signals specialised, in-demand expertise, because securing a database well is a distinct skill that general administration does not guarantee.

A Specialist, Valuable Skill

Database security expertise is scarce relative to demand, particularly as data protection regulations tighten. The certification validates that you can implement encryption, access control, and auditing correctly, which is exactly the competence compliance-driven organisations need. The skills also transfer conceptually to other database platforms and to cloud data security.

Registration

The exam is scheduled through Pearson VUE’s Oracle programme, at a test centre or online with a proctor. Confirm current requirements when you book, since Oracle periodically updates its certification portfolio and exam versions.

How Should You Structure a 1Z0-116 Study Plan?

Eight to ten weeks at eight to ten hours per week suits most candidates with Oracle database administration experience, and longer for those newer to the platform. Because the exam is broad and hands-on, practising each security feature in a test database matters far more than reading, and your plan should cover the full topic list rather than favouring familiar areas.

A Ten-Week Sequence

1. Weeks one to two – authentication. Work through user management, password security, and application contexts in a test database.
2. Weeks three to four – authorization. Practise privileges, roles, and the fine grained access control options, including VPD and Label Security.
3. Weeks five to six – Database Vault and auditing. Configure realms and command rules, then set up unified and fine-grained auditing.
4. Weeks seven to eight – encryption and network. Implement Transparent Data Encryption, wallet management, and network access controls.
5. Weeks nine to ten – data protection and review. Cover redaction, masking, and assessment tools, then move to timed practice.

The Habit That Separates Passes From Retakes

Configure every feature at least once. A candidate who has actually set up Database Vault, enabled Transparent Data Encryption, and created an audit policy answers the practical questions with confidence, while one who has only read struggles with the breadth. Working through a full 1Z0-116 practice exam under timed conditions also reveals which of the twelve topic areas you have under-covered.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many questions are on the 1Z0-116 exam?

The exam contains 72 multiple-choice questions to be completed in 120 minutes. That leaves comfortable time per question, though the breadth of topics means preparation must be wide.

What is the passing score for the Oracle 1Z0-116 exam?

The passing score is 59 percent. Because the questions sample across twelve topic areas, consistent coverage of the whole syllabus matters more than depth in a few.

How much does the 1Z0-116 exam cost?

The exam fee is $245 USD, though the price varies by country and currency. It is booked through Pearson VUE as part of Oracle’s certification programme.

Are there prerequisites for the 1Z0-116?

There are no formal prerequisites, but the exam assumes solid Oracle database administration experience. Understanding how the database works is effectively required before securing it.

What is Oracle Database Vault?

Oracle Database Vault enforces separation of duties, allowing a DBA to administer a database without necessarily accessing the sensitive data inside it. It uses realms, factors, rule sets, and command rules to control access.

How much encryption knowledge does the exam require?

A significant amount. The exam covers Transparent Data Encryption at column and tablespace level, key and wallet management, and TLS for data in transit, so encryption is a major topic area.

What is the difference between data redaction and data masking?

Data redaction alters displayed values at query time without changing stored data, protecting production. Data masking permanently replaces sensitive data, typically for non-production environments.

Do I need hands-on access to an Oracle database?

Effectively yes. The exam is practical, and configuring users, Database Vault, encryption, and auditing in a real database translates far better than reading documentation alone.

What jobs can the certification support?

It maps to database security administrator, database administrator, and security engineer roles, particularly in organisations running Oracle databases where data protection is a priority.

How long does it take to prepare for the 1Z0-116?

Eight to ten weeks at eight to ten hours per week is realistic for candidates with Oracle database administration experience. Those newer to Oracle should plan for longer and prioritise hands-on practice.

Conclusion

The Oracle 1Z0-116 is a genuine security certification for the Oracle database, and its twelve topic areas cover the full defensive surface: authentication, authorization, preventive controls, auditing, encryption, and data protection. The absence of weightings means breadth is everything, and consistent coverage of the whole syllabus decides the outcome.

Ground your preparation in a live database, because the exam rewards configuration experience over memorised features. Pay particular attention to Database Vault, Transparent Data Encryption, and unified auditing, since these represent Oracle’s most powerful and most examined security capabilities.

Plan eight to ten weeks, work through every topic area rather than skimming, and configure each feature at least once. The 1Z0-116 validates a scarce and valuable skill, securing the data attackers most want, and it opens the database security roles where that skill protects an organisation’s most sensitive asset.

What Does the Oracle 1Z0-084 Exam Cover?

Oracle 1Z0-084, “Oracle Database 19c Performance Management and Tuning,” is a 55-question, 90-minute multiple-choice exam requiring 60 percent to pass, priced at $245 USD. It spans sixteen topic areas covering diagnostics, AWR-based tools, SQL identification and tuning, optimiser influence, memory tuning, Real Application Testing, and In-Memory features.

No published weightings

Oracle does not publish weightings for this exam, which changes how you plan. With sixteen areas sharing 55 questions, no single topic can dominate, so breadth beats depth, and a topic you skipped entirely is a real risk at a 60 percent threshold. The security specialism is documented far more precisely, as the Oracle 1Z0-116 study guide shows.

Thinking in clusters

The sixteen areas group naturally into five clusters, and thinking in clusters is far more useful than working through a flat list:

• Diagnostics and instrumentation: tuning methods, Statspack, log and trace files, metrics, alerts, baselines
• AWR-based analysis: AWR reports, ASH, ADDM, application monitoring
• SQL tuning: identifying problem statements, influencing the optimiser, reducing operation cost, SQL performance management
• Memory tuning: shared pool, buffer cache, PGA, automatic memory management
• Advanced features: Real Application Testing, In-Memory

Pacing and question style

Roughly 98 seconds per question means the exam rewards recognition over derivation. You should be able to look at a described symptom and know which tool investigates it. Oracle’s Database Tuning Guide is the authoritative reference for the whole syllabus.

Which Tuning Methodology Does the Exam Assume?

1Z0-084 assumes a top-down, evidence-led methodology: measure where time is actually being spent, address the largest contributor, then measure again. The exam consistently rewards diagnosis before action and penalises the instinct to apply a known fix to an undiagnosed symptom.

Wait event analysis

Wait event analysis is the foundation. Oracle instruments where sessions spend time, and the resulting wait events tell you what the database was waiting on rather than what you assume it was waiting on. A system that appears slow may be waiting on I/O, on a latch, on a lock held by another session, or on nothing at all because it is CPU-bound, and each demands a completely different response. The same measure-first habit runs through general database tuning practice, whatever the engine.

Wait classes to memorise

The classification worth memorising is the wait class: user I/O, system I/O, concurrency, configuration, commit, application, and network. Classifying a wait narrows the investigation immediately, and questions often present a wait profile and ask what it indicates.

Diagnosing scope

The second principle is scope. A problem affecting one SQL statement is not the same as one affecting an entire instance, and the tools differ accordingly: SQL-level tools for the former, AWR and ADDM for the latter. Choosing an instance-wide tool to diagnose a single slow query, or vice versa, is a reliable distractor.

Statspack, the older alternative

Statspack appears in the syllabus as the older alternative to AWR. Know that it provides similar snapshot-based analysis without requiring the Diagnostics Pack licence, which is why it persists in environments that are not licensed for AWR.

How Do AWR, ASH, and ADDM Differ?

AWR, ASH, and ADDM are related but answer different questions. AWR stores periodic snapshots of cumulative statistics; ASH samples active session state every second; ADDM analyses AWR data automatically and reports findings with recommendations. Knowing which to reach for is among the most examinable skills in the syllabus.

AWR: the historical baseline

AWR is the historical baseline. Snapshots are taken on a schedule and an AWR report compares two of them, showing what changed over that interval: top wait events, top SQL, load profile, and instance efficiency. It answers “what was happening between 2pm and 3pm” but cannot resolve finer detail than the snapshot interval.

ASH: sampling active sessions

ASH fills exactly that gap. By sampling active sessions every second it captures short-lived problems that a snapshot comparison averages away: the four-minute spike inside a one-hour AWR window. When a question describes a brief, transient stall, ASH is almost always the answer.

ADDM: automated diagnosis

ADDM is the automated layer. It reads AWR data, identifies the largest contributors to database time, and issues findings with recommendations and an estimated benefit. The exam expects you to know that ADDM findings are ranked by impact and that its recommendations are advisory rather than obligatory.

The practical diagnostic sequence

The practical sequence, and a defensible answer to many scenario questions, is ADDM first for a fast overview, AWR for detail across an interval, and ASH when the problem is too short-lived for either.

What Role Do Metrics, Alerts, and Baselines Play?

Metrics, alerts, and baselines provide the reference point that makes performance judgements meaningful. Without a baseline, no metric can be called good or bad: the exam repeatedly tests the idea that performance is relative to normal, not to an absolute number.

Moving versus fixed baselines

A moving window baseline captures typical activity over a rolling period, while a fixed baseline preserves a specific interval you deliberately chose: a known-good period, or a peak processing window worth comparing against later. Understand that a baseline’s purpose is comparison, so preserving a representative period is what makes it useful.

Adaptive thresholds

Adaptive thresholds follow directly. Rather than alerting when a metric crosses a fixed value, adaptive thresholds derive alert levels from baseline statistics, so an alert fires when behaviour is abnormal for that workload at that time. This handles the common case where 2am batch activity and 2pm interactive load have entirely different normal ranges.

Retention and baseline settings

Know also that AWR retains snapshots for a configurable period and that baselines are excluded from automatic purging. That detail explains why a preserved baseline remains available for comparison long after ordinary snapshots have aged out.

How Do You Identify Problem SQL Statements?

Identifying problem SQL means finding the statements consuming the most resource, not the ones that feel slow. The exam tests ranking by resource consumption, reading execution plans, and distinguishing a statement that is individually expensive from one that is cheap but executed enormously often.

Resource use versus elapsed time

That distinction is the domain’s central insight. A query taking ten seconds and running once an hour costs less than a query taking fifty milliseconds and running a million times. AWR’s top SQL sections rank by total resource consumed rather than by per-execution cost, which is why a seemingly trivial statement can dominate a report.

Reading execution plans

Execution plan reading is the core technical skill. You need to interpret access paths (full table scan versus index scan and their variants), join methods, and cardinality estimates. The single most valuable diagnostic habit is comparing estimated rows against actual rows: a large discrepancy means the optimiser is working from bad information, and that misestimate is usually the real problem rather than the plan it produced.

Current versus actual plans

Know the difference between the plan the optimiser would choose now and the plan actually used at execution, since statistics or bind values may have changed since. Questions frequently hinge on that gap.

What Does It Mean to Influence the Optimizer?

Influencing the optimiser means changing the information or constraints it works from so it makes better choices, through statistics, hints, SQL profiles, and plan baselines. The exam strongly prefers approaches that improve the optimiser’s information over those that override its judgement.

Statistics first

Statistics come first and matter most. The cost-based optimiser chooses plans using object statistics, and stale or missing statistics produce poor plans no matter what else is configured. Understand what column statistics, histograms, and extended statistics contribute: histograms in particular matter for skewed data, where an average-based estimate badly misrepresents a specific value.

Hints: the blunt instrument

Hints are the blunt instrument. They force a decision, which fixes today’s problem and freezes the plan against tomorrow’s better option as data volumes change. The exam’s position is that a hint is a last resort after statistics and structure have been addressed.

SQL plan management

SQL plan management is the more sophisticated middle ground. A plan baseline records accepted plans for a statement so the optimiser will not use a new plan until it has been verified as at least as good. That directly addresses plan regression: the case where an upgrade or statistics refresh silently degrades a previously fine query. Recognising plan baselines as the answer to regression risk is a reliable exam point. The SQL Tuning Guide covers baselines and profiles in detail.

Which Techniques Reduce the Cost of SQL Operations?

Reducing SQL cost covers access path selection, join optimisation, sorting, partitioning, and result caching. The unifying principle is reducing the volume of data touched and the work performed per row, and the exam expects reasoning from that principle rather than a checklist.

What the syllabus lists here

The published topic list for this area is about storage as much as query shape. It names shrinking segments, managing chaining and migration, configuring index and table performance options, configuring table compression, and diagnosing and tuning space related issues. A migrated or chained row costs extra block visits on every access, and a sparsely filled segment makes a full scan read more blocks than the data needs, so each item is a way of cutting work per row.

Access path choice

Access path choice is the most examinable topic and is more nuanced than intuition suggests. An index is not automatically better than a full table scan: retrieving a large fraction of a table via an index means many single-block reads plus table access per row, which is frequently slower than one efficient multi-block scan. The examinable variable is selectivity: indexes win when a small proportion of rows is returned.

Join method selection

Join method selection follows similar logic. Nested loops suit small driving row sources with an indexed inner side; hash joins suit large unindexed joins; sort-merge suits pre-sorted inputs and non-equality conditions. Questions describe data volumes and expect you to match the method.

Sorting and PGA spills

Sorting deserves attention because it is expensive and often avoidable. Sorts spilling from PGA memory to temporary segments are dramatically slower, which links this topic directly to PGA tuning. Partitioning reduces cost through pruning (a filter on the partition key lets the optimiser skip partitions entirely), and result caching eliminates repeated work for queries against stable data.

How Are the Shared Pool, Buffer Cache, and PGA Tuned?

Memory tuning covers three structures with distinct purposes. The shared pool caches parsed SQL and dictionary information, the buffer cache holds data blocks read from disk, and the PGA provides per-session working memory for sorts and hash operations. Each has its own symptoms and its own fix.

Shared pool: hard parsing

Shared pool problems usually appear as excessive hard parsing. Every hard parse consumes CPU and latches, and the classic cause is literal values in SQL producing a distinct statement per execution rather than one reusable statement with bind variables. The correct answer to that scenario is bind variables, not a larger shared pool: enlarging the pool caches more unshareable statements without reducing parsing.

Buffer cache tuning

Buffer cache tuning targets physical reads. A low hit ratio means blocks are being read from disk repeatedly, though the exam is careful here: a high hit ratio does not prove health, because an inefficient query performing enormous logical reads can show an excellent ratio while performing terribly. Ratios are a starting point, never a conclusion.

PGA tuning

PGA tuning is about keeping sorts and hash joins in memory. Operations that exceed available PGA spill to temporary tablespace, and the resulting disk activity is far slower. Understand the optimal, one-pass, and multi-pass distinction: multi-pass operations indicate serious memory shortage.

Automatic memory management ties them together by letting Oracle distribute memory between components dynamically. Know what the automatic parameters govern and that manual sizing remains available where a workload has known characteristics that automation handles poorly.

Where Do Real Application Testing and In-Memory Fit?

Real Application Testing and In-Memory are the syllabus’s advanced features. RAT validates the performance impact of a change before production; In-Memory accelerates analytic queries through a columnar memory format. Both are conceptually examined rather than tested at configuration depth.

Database Replay and SPA

Real Application Testing has two components with different purposes. Database Replay captures real production workload and replays it against a changed system, testing the whole concurrent workload including contention. SQL Performance Analyzer works at statement level, comparing execution before and after a change to identify regressions specifically.

When to use each

The examinable distinction: use SPA when you need to know which statements a change would regress, and Database Replay when you need to know how the system behaves as a whole under realistic concurrency. Together they address the fundamental problem that a change tested on synthetic data may behave entirely differently on production workload.

Database In-Memory

In-Memory stores selected tables in a columnar format in memory alongside the normal row format. The dual-format architecture is the concept to hold: analytic queries scanning few columns across many rows benefit enormously from columnar access, while transactional queries retrieving whole rows continue using the row store. Know that population is selective (you choose which objects to place in memory) and that it accelerates queries rather than changing results. The Database In-Memory Guide covers population and query behaviour.

Who Should Pursue the 1Z0-084 Credential?

1Z0-084 suits practising Oracle DBAs responsible for performance, database engineers supporting large transactional or analytic systems, and consultants who are called in when a system is slow. It is a specialist credential assuming existing administration experience rather than an entry point. DBAs extending into AI workloads on Oracle Database 23ai often pair that tuning work with the Oracle AI Vector Search certification.

Where the value concentrates

The value is concentrated in a specific professional situation: being the person who can explain why a system is slow with evidence rather than opinion. Performance problems attract confident guesses, and a DBA who can produce an AWR report, point to the dominant wait event, and show the plan change that caused it occupies a different position from one who suggests adding an index.

For engineers from other platforms

For engineers moving from other database platforms, the exam maps familiar concepts onto Oracle’s specific instrumentation. The underlying ideas (bad estimates cause bad plans, memory pressure causes spilling, ratios mislead) transfer from any mature database. What is Oracle-specific is the toolset, and that is precisely what the syllabus covers.

Where it fits in Oracle’s tracks

Within Oracle’s certification structure this sits alongside the administration track as a specialisation rather than a prerequisite step. Practitioners working across Oracle’s broader portfolio often pair it with cloud and development credentials such as the 1Z0-1127-24 OCI path or the 1Z0-909 MySQL developer route, depending on where their estate sits. Current paths are listed on Oracle’s certification portal.

How Should You Prepare for 1Z0-084?

Eight to ten weeks at six to eight hours per week suits practising DBAs. Effective 1Z0-084 preparation requires a database you can deliberately make slow, because the exam presents symptoms and asks for causes: a pattern you learn fastest by creating the symptoms yourself.

1. Weeks one to two: methodology and diagnostics. Learn the wait event model and wait classes. Generate load, then read the resulting wait profile and predict the bottleneck before confirming it.
2. Weeks three to four: AWR tooling. Generate AWR reports across intervals and learn to read them top-down. Create a short spike and confirm that ASH catches what AWR averaged away. Run ADDM and evaluate its findings critically.
3. Weeks five to six: SQL tuning. Read execution plans daily, always comparing estimated to actual rows. Delete statistics to see the damage, gather them to see the recovery, then create a plan baseline and observe how it blocks a new plan.
4. Week seven: memory tuning. Cause hard parsing with literals and fix it with binds. Undersize the PGA to force a multi-pass sort, then resize and compare.
5. Weeks eight to ten: advanced features and review. Explore SQL Performance Analyzer and In-Memory population, then move to timed practice across all sixteen areas.

Audit your coverage explicitly

Because no weightings are published, audit your coverage explicitly before booking. List all sixteen areas, rate your confidence in each, and spend remaining time on the weakest: with sixteen areas sharing 55 questions, a couple of blind spots can eat into the margin above 60 percent. Timed work through the 1Z0-084 practice exam questions exposes which areas you have been avoiding.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many questions are on the 1Z0-084 exam?

The exam contains 55 multiple-choice questions to be completed in 90 minutes, allowing roughly 98 seconds per question. The pace suits recognition rather than lengthy derivation.

What is the passing score for 1Z0-084?

You need 60 percent, which means approximately 33 of the 55 questions correct. There is no penalty for incorrect answers, so answer everything.

How much does the Oracle Performance Tuning exam cost?

The exam fee is $245 USD, varying by region. Oracle periodically offers discounted vouchers through its learning subscriptions.

Are there prerequisites for 1Z0-084?

No formal prerequisites apply, but the exam assumes working Oracle Database administration experience. It is a specialisation rather than an entry-level credential.

What is the difference between AWR and ASH?

AWR takes periodic snapshots of cumulative statistics and compares two points in time. ASH samples active sessions every second, so it captures short-lived spikes that an AWR interval would average away.

When should I use a hint instead of gathering statistics?

Rarely. The exam favours improving the optimiser’s information through accurate statistics over forcing a decision with a hint. Hints freeze a plan and prevent adaptation as data changes, so they are a last resort.

Does a high buffer cache hit ratio mean the database is healthy?

No. An inefficient query performing enormous logical reads can produce an excellent hit ratio while performing terribly. Ratios are a starting point for investigation, never a conclusion.

What causes excessive hard parsing?

Most commonly, literal values in SQL producing a distinct statement per execution instead of one reusable statement. The fix is bind variables, not a larger shared pool, which would simply cache more unshareable statements.

What is a SQL plan baseline?

A recorded set of accepted execution plans for a statement. The optimiser will not use a new plan until it has been verified as at least as good, which protects against plan regression after upgrades or statistics changes.

How long should I study for 1Z0-084?

Eight to ten weeks at six to eight hours per week is realistic for practising DBAs. Because no domain weightings are published, weight your time toward whichever of the sixteen areas you rate weakest.

Conclusion

Oracle 1Z0-084 measures diagnostic discipline more than tuning knowledge. Its sixteen areas all serve one loop: instrument the system, identify where time is actually spent, address the largest contributor, and measure again. Candidates who arrive with a catalogue of fixes but no method struggle, because the exam consistently asks what you would investigate rather than what you would change.

Three ideas carry disproportionate weight. Wait events tell you what the database was actually waiting on. Estimated-versus-actual row counts reveal when the optimiser is working from bad information. And ratios describe activity without proving health.

Prepare on a database you are free to break. Delete statistics and watch the plans degrade, flood the shared pool with literals, starve the PGA until sorts spill. The exam describes exactly those symptoms, and having produced them yourself is the difference between recognising the cause and guessing at it.

What Is the Oracle 1Z0-1124-26 Certification?

Oracle 1Z0-1124-26 is the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Networking Professional exam, which leads to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Certified Networking Professional credential. It replaced 1Z0-1124-25 and validates your ability to design, deploy, secure, and troubleshoot networking on OCI, including virtual cloud networks, hybrid connectivity, transitive routing, and workload migration.

The word doing the work is professional. This is not an introductory cloud exam. It assumes you already understand networking fundamentals and are being tested on applying them within OCI’s specific model: its gateways, its routing behaviour, and its connectivity products.

Fifty questions across 90 minutes gives nearly two minutes each, which is comfortable pacing for scenario-based questions. The 68% threshold is a slightly unusual figure: it means 34 correct answers out of 50, leaving 16 you can miss. That is more headroom than the number first suggests, but the scenario format means individual questions carry real reasoning weight.

What Does the 1Z0-1124-26 Exam Cover?

The exam spans seven domains covering VCN design, network planning and application services, hybrid architectures, transitive routing, secure networking, workload migration, and troubleshooting. Three domains carry 20% each, and together they decide 60% of your result.

The shape here is unusually clear. Three heavyweight domains at 20% carry 60% of the marks, and four supporting domains at 10% carry the remaining 40%.

Notice what the three heavyweights have in common: planning, connecting, and securing. None of them is about the mechanics of creating a VCN; that is the 10% domain. The exam is weighted toward architectural judgement rather than resource provisioning, which is exactly what separates a professional-level credential from an associate one.

What Changed From 1Z0-1124-25 to 1Z0-1124-26?

1Z0-1124-26 removes the OCI Networking Best Practices domain, which sat in the 1Z0-1124-25 syllabus at 0%, and retires one obsolete security objective on IaC and OKE services. The exam name loses its year, and the question count, duration, 68% pass mark, $245 price and the other seven domain weightings are unchanged.

If you started preparing on the 2025 edition, very little of your work is wasted. Every topic in the seven remaining domains carries over, from IPv4 and IPv6 addressing to IPSec over FastConnect and Zero Trust Packet Routing.

The removed domain listed four areas: architecture design, security, connectivity, and logging and monitoring best practices. They no longer appear as a standalone domain, but the thinking behind them is still useful. When a scenario question offers four technically workable designs, the stronger answer is usually the one that logs properly, segments appropriately, avoids a single point of failure, or follows least privilege.

So read recommended patterns as a lens rather than a chapter. Whenever you study a product, whether a gateway, a firewall or a connectivity option, ask what the recommended way to deploy it is and why. That habit is what resolves the final choice between two plausible answers.

Why Is Hybrid Networking Worth 20%?

Design for Hybrid Networking Architectures is 20% of the exam, covering dynamic routing gateways and their attachments, BGP, VPN services, FastConnect products, IPSec over FastConnect, and multicloud connectivity. It carries this weight because almost no enterprise runs OCI in isolation; the interesting problems are at the boundary.

The dynamic routing gateway is the concept to anchor everything else to. It is the hub through which a VCN reaches outside itself, and understanding what can attach to it (VCNs, IPSec tunnels, FastConnect virtual circuits, remote peering connections) gives you a mental model that most of this domain hangs from.

BGP appears explicitly and rewards genuine understanding rather than recognition. Route advertisement, path selection, and how routes propagate across a hybrid boundary all matter, particularly when a question describes traffic taking an unexpected path and asks why.

Then there is the recurring commercial-technical trade-off between VPN and FastConnect. Site-to-site VPN runs over the public internet: quick to establish, variable in performance. FastConnect is dedicated private connectivity: consistent and higher bandwidth, but slower to provision and more expensive. Scenario questions almost always turn on which of those properties the described business actually needs. Oracle’s OCI networking overview is the authoritative reference for the products involved, and the FastConnect documentation covers the dedicated-connectivity options in detail. The routing behaviour underneath them is not Oracle-specific: FastConnect and site-to-site VPN both exchange routes over BGP, defined in IETF RFC 4271, so path selection questions reward understanding the protocol rather than the console.

How Is Secure Networking Tested?

Implement and Operate Secure OCI Networking and Connectivity Solutions is 20% of the exam and covers IAM concepts for inter-tenancy communication, the Bastion service, CloudShell, Network Firewall, WAF, edge and certificate services, and Zero Trust Packet Routing. It is applied security: configuring and operating protections rather than discussing them abstractly.

IAM underpins the domain, and OCI’s model has its own vocabulary. Compartments, policies, dynamic groups, and principals behave differently from other clouds’ equivalents, and policy syntax questions are common. Understanding how a policy grants access to a compartment is foundational, and the OCI IAM documentation covers the model precisely.

The access services are the practical heart. The Bastion service provides controlled, time-bound access to private resources without exposing them publicly, which makes it the answer whenever a scenario needs administrative reach into a private subnet without a public IP. CloudShell sits alongside it as a browser-based access path.

What VCN and Transitive Routing Knowledge Is Needed?

VCN design is 10% of the exam and transitive routing another 10%. Together they cover subnet characteristics, IPv4 and IPv6 addressing, gateway roles, endpoints including Object Storage endpoints, local peering gateways, network appliances, and transitive routing configurations. Smaller domains, but foundational to everything above them.

On VCNs, know the gateways by purpose rather than by name. An internet gateway provides two-way public connectivity; a NAT gateway allows outbound-only access for private resources; a service gateway reaches Oracle services without traversing the internet; a dynamic routing gateway handles hybrid and cross-VCN traffic. Most VCN questions reduce to choosing the right gateway for a stated requirement.

Transitive routing is the more conceptually demanding of the two. The core issue is that peered networks do not forward traffic on behalf of each other by default: if VCN A peers with B and B peers with C, A cannot reach C automatically. Knowing how to architect around that, using a DRG or a network appliance as a transit point, is precisely what the domain examines.

IPv6 also appears explicitly in the VCN domain, which is worth flagging because many candidates have far less hands-on IPv6 experience than IPv4. Do not assume your IPv4 knowledge covers it, since addressing and gateway behaviour differ enough to generate questions.

Who Should Take the 1Z0-1124-26 Exam?

This certification suits cloud network engineers, architects, and infrastructure professionals working with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It is a professional-level credential, so real networking knowledge and hands-on OCI exposure matter in practice, well beyond what the exam page lists.

Network engineers moving into OCI are the strongest fit. Your BGP, routing, and VPN knowledge transfers directly into the hybrid domain, which is 20% of the exam. The work is learning OCI’s specific model (gateway types, DRG attachments, compartment-based IAM) on top of fundamentals you already hold.

Cloud engineers with OCI experience but a thinner networking background face the inverse challenge. The OCI service knowledge comes easily, and the networking depth, particularly BGP and transitive routing, is where preparation time belongs.

The third audience is architects and security-focused practitioners, for whom the 20% security domain and the design-judgement focus make this more relevant than a purely operational certification. Engineers on the data side of OCI have their own professional paper, and the 1Z0-1110-26 data science exam is as platform heavy as this one is design heavy.

How Should You Prepare for 1Z0-1124-26?

Effective preparation concentrates on the three 20% domains (planning, hybrid connectivity, and security) because together they decide 60% of your result. Most candidates need six to ten weeks. Hands-on time in an OCI tenancy matters more than reading, because the exam is scenario-driven.

Build topologies rather than reading about them. Create two VCNs, peer them, discover for yourself that transit does not work, then solve it with a DRG. That sequence teaches transitive routing in an afternoon in a way no diagram manages, and the scenarios on the exam are described in exactly those practical terms.

Treat phase six as essential rather than optional revision. Reviewing Oracle’s recommended patterns immediately before the exam is unusually high-value, because it is what lets you choose between two designs that both technically work.

Test under timed conditions before booking. Working through a realistic 1Z0-1124-26 practice exam exposes whether you can reason through a connectivity scenario at pace, and which of the seven domains is quietly weaker than it felt while studying. Oracle’s own certification path overview is worth checking for current exam status, since Oracle versions its cloud exams by year.

Is the OCI Networking Professional Worth Earning?

1Z0-1124-26 is worth most to professionals whose organisations run Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and to consultants delivering OCI implementations. As a vendor-specific professional credential, its value tracks OCI adoption in your market rather than cloud networking skills generally. Those same organisations increasingly need database-side AI skills, which are covered in this Oracle vector search guide.

Its strongest feature is the specialism it certifies. Cloud generalists are plentiful; engineers who can architect hybrid connectivity, design transitive routing, and secure it properly on a specific platform are considerably scarcer. That combination is where the harder and better-paid cloud networking work sits.

Timing is a genuine consideration too. Oracle versions these exams by year, as the move from 1Z0-1124-25 to 1Z0-1124-26 shows, which keeps content current but means the credential has a defined shelf life. Factor recertification into the decision rather than treating it as permanent.

The honest limitation is portability. OCI-specific knowledge does not transfer wholesale to other clouds, though the underlying concepts (BGP, hybrid connectivity, segmentation, zero trust) generalise well. If your work is anchored to Oracle Cloud, the specificity is the point; if you move across providers, weigh it against a vendor-neutral networking credential.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many questions are on the 1Z0-1124-26 exam?

The exam contains 50 questions with a 90-minute limit, giving nearly two minutes per question. That pacing is comfortable, which reflects the scenario-based format: many questions describe a networking requirement or fault that takes genuine reading and reasoning. Networking is one layer of a wider OCI architecture track, and the OCI multicloud architect exam picks up where single-cloud design stops.

What is the passing score for 1Z0-1124-26?

The passing score is 68%, meaning 34 correct answers out of 50. That leaves 16 questions you can miss. Because three domains carry 20% each, weakness in planning, hybrid connectivity, or security consumes that margin quickly. The same 68 percent bar applies on the 1Z0-1109-26 DevOps certification, so the pacing maths carries across.

How much does the exam cost?

The exam costs $245 USD, and pricing may vary by country or local currency. Third-party practice test products are priced separately and cost considerably less, so do not confuse the two when budgeting for the certification.

What changed between 1Z0-1124-25 and 1Z0-1124-26?

The OCI Networking Best Practices domain, weighted at 0% in 1Z0-1124-25, has been removed, along with one obsolete IaC and OKE security objective. The question count, duration, pass mark, price and the other seven domains are unchanged. Oracle refreshes its other professional papers the same way, including the one on OCI logging and monitoring.

Which domains are most heavily weighted?

Three domains carry 20% each: planning and designing networking solutions, hybrid networking architectures, and secure networking and connectivity. Together they decide 60% of the exam, and all three test architectural judgement rather than resource provisioning.

Do you need BGP knowledge for this exam?

Yes. BGP appears explicitly in the hybrid networking domain, which is 20% of the exam. You should understand route advertisement, path selection, and how routes propagate across hybrid boundaries, particularly for questions where traffic takes an unexpected path.

What is transitive routing in OCI?

Peered networks do not forward traffic on behalf of each other by default, so if VCN A peers with B and B peers with C, A cannot reach C automatically. Transitive routing is architecting around that using a dynamic routing gateway or a network appliance as a transit point.

When should you choose FastConnect over VPN?

FastConnect provides dedicated private connectivity with consistent performance and higher bandwidth, but takes longer to provision and costs more. Site-to-site VPN runs over the public internet and is faster to establish. Scenario questions turn on which property the described business actually requires.

How long should you study for 1Z0-1124-26?

Six to ten weeks suits most candidates, depending on existing networking depth and OCI exposure. Concentrate on the three 20% domains, and build real topologies in a tenancy rather than studying diagrams, since the exam is heavily scenario-based.

Conclusion

1Z0-1124-26 is an architecture exam wearing networking clothes. Three domains at 20% each (planning, hybrid connectivity, and security) carry 60% of the marks, and all three ask for judgement rather than provisioning steps. Creating a VCN is the 10% domain; deciding how it should connect and be protected is where the exam actually lives.

Build topologies rather than reading about them, learn the DRG as the hub that hybrid connectivity hangs from, and give BGP and transitive routing the hands-on time they need. Then review Oracle’s recommended design patterns last, because they are what let you pick the recommended design over the merely workable one. Fifty questions, 90 minutes, 68% to pass, seven domains, and a blueprint that tells you plainly where to aim.