How to become an Oracle SOA Architect Certified Expert

I just took and passed the Oracle SOA Foundations, Adoption and Implementation exam (1Z0-114). The exam is actually acquired from BEA, and is a combination of both the BEA SOA Foundations and BEA SOA Adoption and Implementation exams. Passing the exam grants you an OCE (Oracle Certified Expert) as an Oracle SOA Architect.

Certification Details
    Certification:              Oracle SOA Architect Certified Expert (OCE)
    Exam:                       Oracle SOA Foundations, Adoption and Implementation
    Time:                        120 minutes
    Cost:                         $195
    Passing score:            66%
    Number of questions:  78 

Study Material
    BEA White Paper Domain Model For SOA

Preparation Time
You will need 20 hours (or more, depending on your current knowledge).

Sample Questions
    BEA SOA Adoption & Implementation Mock Exam
    Oracle SOA Foundations, Adoption and Implementation Sample Questions 
    Sample questions for IBM SOA Test 664/665
    IBM SOA Fundamentals (000-664 Exam) 

Degree of Difficulty
Oracle certification exams are not usually easy, but this provides recognition and credibility to the certification.

Based on the scale below, if you have extensive architecture, design, and implementation experience in SOA and related technologies, the exam is slightly above average in difficulty (straight black line). If you are a SOA developer with little architecting experience, the exam may be on the difficult end (dotted black line).

Around a third of the exam focuses on explicit technical questions (e.g., a Service Directory provides the ability to discover existing services). The second third involves concepts surrounding the BEA Domain Model (see Study Material). The last third focuses on story-board scenarios, and asks questions in areas such as canonical design, SOA benefits, cost justifications, architectural decisions, process approaches, roadmap prioritization, SOA adoption challenges, and more. 

Preparing for the Exam

1. Read the study material and know it by heart.
 
2. You should understand and know how to explain each of the following:

• BPEL, service composition, orchestration, composite applications, service reuse.
• ESB, VETO, transformation, routing.
• Fine-grained vs. coarse-grained services.
• XA protocol, compensating transactions, idempotent operations.
• Calling/exchange paradigms: asynchronous, synchronous, callback, polling, fan-out, callout, uni-directional, bi-directional, fork/join.
• Terminology: Web services, portlets, WSDL, XML, UDDI, WSRP, JSR, AJAX, HTTP, SSL, SOAP, EDA, JMS, SAML, SLA, canonicals, adapters.
• WS-* specifications: WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Policy, WS-Coordination, WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-Addressing.
• Products: Service Registry, Service Bus, Policy Directory, BAM, Web Services Manager. 

3. Go through the BEA SOA Adoption & Implementation Mock Exam and Oracle SOA Foundations, Adoption and Implementation Sample Questions.

4. Leverage your SOA architecture and implementation experience. 

Oracle Links 
For more information about the certification and the exam, check out:
    http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getpage?page_id=284
    http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getpage?page_id=41&p_exam_id=1Z0_114

My Opinions
The exam assumes architecture level experience within the SOA space. 

For example, what role does BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) play in your enterprise? What is the best way to push data to BAM? How does this, if at all, impact your main operational process? Unless you have architected the usage of and/or implemented BAM, you may not know. If you can answer these questions, then you should be able to answer one of the BAM related questions in the exam.

Being a perfectionist, I noticed a few grammatical errors in the exam, missing periods, double quotes not closed, etc., but nothing that would impact your understanding of the question.

Final thoughts:

• Follow what I mentioned in "Preparing for the Exam". This will give you what you need to cover 75% of the exam.
• Questions are not technical in nature. For example, you will not find questions that ask "What is the request security token structure in WS-Trust?" You will most likely encounter questions such as "Company X currently has services on a legacy system and want to migrate them off. What should they do?"
• Go through the mock exams.
• Know the BEA White Paper Domain Model For SOA by heart. If you would like the summary and study notes I made from this white paper, then contact me and I'll be happy to share it.
• The IBM mock exams I listed above have a few questions that are similar to those that appear in the exam, so going through them will probably firm up your concepts. 

Good luck!