Gohtalojee, My best wishes first of all. I got hired direct because i did the training in an Indian consultancy and they charged me about 4 thousand.It was a package deal that if you do MCDBA and later want to do some other courses then there was discount for the second course. So it was around 4200 including books etc plus free vouchers for the certification exams,I used three of them. I did my training in an institute called mircohard,you can talk to them and take classes if you need info here it is microhard.com. Either microsoft or Oracle whichever you want to do,please make sure you know someone in this field who is already working. You need to be in a very good relationship with this person.I will tell you the reasons: people dont want to share corporate info due to security reasons and personal ones as well. I bought whisky every friday to invite one Nepali DBA who said would help me prepare for the interviews and all,I was hopeless,had to do this. He barely taught me anything. Make sure you have someone who will at least tell you his first few hours of work at his job. Without getting a real picture of what happens inside the dark room of data centers you will never make it to that cubicle ( it's very comfortable after you reach there). Think of certification right after you do the training. Certifications add value to your searches,you get more calls which means more chances of being hired. any other things you can email me and I will happily share with you, conditionally speaking, whenever I can.oracleguy10g@yahoo.com