1Z0-078 Lists RAC First, but Your Cluster Is Built from the Bottom Up

If you run Oracle databases on more than one server, you already know the order things happen in on a real cluster. Someone prepares the operating system, the shared disks and the networks. Then Grid Infrastructure goes on, which brings Oracle Clusterware and Oracle Automatic Storage Management with it. Only after that does anyone install the database software, and only after that does a RAC database exist to tune, patch and connect to.

Oracle's exam page for 1Z0-078 lists the same material in the opposite order. It starts with RAC databases and architecture, moves on to Grid Infrastructure in the middle, and ends with ASM disk groups, files and the ASM Cluster File System. That is a fine way to describe a job. It is a poor way to learn one, because almost every RAC objective assumes you understand the layers underneath it.

This article follows the build order instead. It is written for the DBA or systems administrator who already looks after clustered databases and wants to know whether 1Z0-078 matches the work on their desk. Every number in it comes from Oracle's own exam page and Oracle's 19c documentation, both checked on 15 October 2026.

What Is the Oracle 1Z0-078 RAC, ASM, and Grid Infrastructure Exam?

1Z0-078 is the exam behind the Oracle Certified Professional, Oracle Database 19c: RAC, ASM, and Grid Infrastructure Administrator credential. Its full title on Oracle MyLearn is "Exam 1Z0-078: Oracle Database 19c: RAC, ASM, and Grid Infrastructure Administration", and the official 1Z0-078 exam page on Oracle MyLearn is where the topic list, the format and the session rules live.

Oracle describes the audience plainly. The certification is for database production systems administrators and database administrators with 12 to 18 months of experience using RAC, ASM and Grid Infrastructure. The exam measures installation, configuration, backup and recovery, monitoring and tuning of those components. Read that as a description of who does well, not as an entry rule: the page states an experience profile, and it is worth being honest with yourself about whether you match it.

The three names in the title are three layers of one stack, and it helps to be precise about how they relate, because the exam is.

Grid Infrastructure: the base layer

Oracle's Introduction to Oracle Clusterware in the 19c Clusterware Administration and Deployment Guide explains that Clusterware lets separate servers communicate so they appear to applications and users as one system. Since Oracle Clusterware 12c, the Clusterware and ASM binaries are installed as a single binary called Oracle Grid Infrastructure. The same guide notes that Clusterware 19c supports only ASM 19c, because ASM sits in the Grid Infrastructure home that also holds Clusterware.

Clusterware keeps two stored components besides its binaries. Voting files record node membership. The Oracle Cluster Registry, or OCR, records cluster configuration: databases, listeners, virtual IP addresses, services and any applications Clusterware manages. Both must sit on shared storage that every cluster node can reach.

ASM: the storage layer

ASM is Oracle's volume manager and file system for database files. Oracle's overview chapter of the 19c ASM Administrator's Guide describes disk groups made of disks, files and allocation units, with normal redundancy giving two-way mirroring, high redundancy three-way mirroring, and external redundancy leaving the mirroring to a RAID subsystem.

RAC: the database layer

Oracle RAC lets several instances open one database. The RAC guide says that having multiple instances access a single database prevents the server from being a single point of failure, and that applications deployed on RAC databases can operate without code changes. RAC depends on Clusterware; the guide calls Clusterware a required component that provides the infrastructure RAC runs on.

So the order on the exam page is top-down, while the order on a real system is bottom-up. Hold on to that idea. It shapes the study plan later in this article.

1Z0-078 Exam Overview and Details

The format is short to state. Everything below is from Oracle's exam page unless marked otherwise.

• Exam code: 1Z0-078
• Exam name: Oracle Database 19c: RAC, ASM, and Grid Infrastructure Administration
• Credential: Oracle Certified Professional, Oracle Database 19c: RAC, ASM, and Grid Infrastructure Administrator
• Delivery: Proctored Online
• Format: Multiple Choice
• Duration: 120 minutes
• Number of questions: 77
• Passing score: 65%
• Price: Oracle's page shows no price to a signed-out visitor. The DBExam syllabus page lists USD $245 and notes that pricing may vary by country or local currency; confirm the figure in your Oracle account at checkout.

What 77 questions in 120 minutes means at the desk

120 minutes across 77 questions is about 93 seconds a question. That is generous for a question that asks you to recognise a view name and tight for one that describes a failed node, a set of services and a client configuration, then asks what the client sees. Plan to move quickly through recall questions so the scenario questions get the time they need.

A 65% passing score on 77 questions works out to just over 50 correct answers, if every question counts the same. Oracle does not publish how it weights individual questions, so treat 51 as a planning number rather than a rule, and aim well above it.

Session rules worth knowing in advance

• A government-issued identification is required to take the exam.
• Check-in time is 30 minutes before the exam time.
• Your computer must meet Oracle's minimum system requirements for online proctoring.
• Results are shown on screen at the close of the exam, and the detailed score report is in Oracle CertView.
• To reschedule, you must do it at least 24 hours before your appointment time.

None of these is unusual, but the 30-minute check-in catches people who block exactly two hours in their calendar. Block three.

Key Topics and Syllabus for 1Z0-078

Oracle's exam page lists 30 topics and 115 objective lines under three groupings. The first grouping has no heading of its own on the page; it is the RAC material. Then come the headings "Grid Infrastructure Administration" and "Automatic Storage Management (ASM) Administration". Counted line by line:

• RAC administration: 12 topics, 49 objective lines
• Grid Infrastructure administration: 11 topics, 41 objective lines
• ASM administration: 7 topics, 25 objective lines

One caution before you use those counts: Oracle publishes no percentage weights for 1Z0-078. A line count shows where the page spends its words, not how many questions each area gets. The 1Z0-078 syllabus on DBExam sets the same topics out on one page with the exam facts beside them, which is handy as a checklist.

Here is the syllabus in the order you would build the system, bottom layer first.

Layer 1: Grid Infrastructure and Clusterware (11 topics)

The Grid Infrastructure grouping covers the life of the cluster itself:

• Introduction to Clusterware and Oracle Clusterware architecture, including startup details and how Grid Plug and Play affects Clusterware
• Flex Clusters and the effect of node failure in one
• Installation planning and pre-tasks: system and network requirements, groups, users and directories
• Grid Infrastructure installation, verifying it, configuring ASM disk groups, and the optional Grid Infrastructure Management Repository
• Managing cluster nodes: extending a cluster, deleting a node, and adding nodes with DBCA
• Traditional Clusterware management: day-to-day tasks, OCR backup and recovery, network settings, what-if command evaluation and secure cluster communication
• Policy-based cluster management: server categorization, policy sets and activating a policy
• Upgrading and patching Grid Infrastructure, including rolling patches and zero-downtime Grid Infrastructure patching
• Troubleshooting Clusterware: log files, diagcollection.pl, resource and component debugging, and OCR problems
• Making applications highly available with Clusterware: policy-managed and administrator-managed databases, application VIPs and application resources

Two documented facts from this layer tend to matter. First, Oracle recommends no more than five voting files, although Clusterware supports up to 15. Second, you can have up to five OCR locations, and you can replace a failed OCR location online as long as it is not the only one. Small numbers like these make good exam distractors, so learn them exactly.

Flex Clusters have their own rules in the Clusterware Administration and Deployment Guide: a Flex Cluster can have as many as 64 Hub Nodes, Hub Nodes have direct access to shared storage and host read-write instances, other nodes request data through Hub Nodes and host read-only instances, Flex Clusters require Grid Naming Service, and you can convert a standard cluster to a Flex Cluster but not the reverse.

Layer 2: ASM, ACFS and ADVM (7 topics)

The ASM grouping is the shortest, but it sits under everything else:

• ASM architecture and components
• ASM instances: initialization parameters, processes, and monitoring with the V$ASM dynamic performance views
• Flex ASM: architecture, installation, configuration and management
• Disk groups: creating, dropping, setting attributes, maintenance, and performance and scalability considerations
• Files, directories and templates, including the format of a fully qualified ASM file name
• Oracle CloudFS: the ASM Dynamic Volume Manager, ASM volumes, ACFS and ACFS snapshots
• CloudFS advanced topics: ACFS auditing, encryption, replication and tagging, and High Availability NFS

The file name objective is a good example of how literal the exam can be. Oracle's chapter on ASM files, directories and templates gives the form as +diskgroup/dbname/filetype/filetypetag.file.incarnation in a non-multitenant database, and +diskgroup/cdb/pdb_guid/filetype/filetypetag.file.incarnation with multitenant. Alias names are told apart because they do not end in a dotted pair of numbers. If you can read +DATA/ORCL/DATAFILE/system.257.967544915 and name every field, that objective is done.

Flex ASM gets three objective lines. The key documented behaviour is in Oracle's Managing Oracle Flex ASM chapter: a small set of ASM instances serves the whole cluster, the number is set with a cardinality setting, and the default is three instances. The ASM overview adds why it matters: in a standard ASM cluster, if the ASM instance on a node fails, the database instances on that node fail too, while with Flex ASM a database instance can reach another ASM instance on another node.

Layer 3: The RAC database (12 topics)

RAC gets the most objective lines, and it is where most candidates already feel at home:

• RAC architecture: the benefits of RAC, why global resources are needed, and global cache coordination
• Installing and configuring RAC, creating a cluster database, and converting a single-instance database to RAC
• Administering RAC: redo log files, undo tablespaces, starting and stopping, and initialization parameters
• Backup and recovery: ARCHIVELOG mode, the fast recovery area, and RMAN in a RAC environment
• Global resources: the Global Resource Directory, global enqueue and instance locks, global buffer cache management, and affinity
• Monitoring and tuning: RAC wait events, AWR and ADDM in RAC, the Cluster Database Performance pages, and SGA runtime management
• High availability of services, and high availability for connections and applications: load balancing, the Load Balancing Advisory, FAN, TAF, Transparent Application Continuity and Dynamic Services Fallback
• Upgrading and patching RAC with OUI and opatch
• RAC One Node conversions in both directions
• Quality of Service Management
• Multitenant in RAC: CDBs, PDBs, PDB services and server pools, and automated PDB patching and relocation

The connections topic is the largest single topic on the page, with eight objective lines. That fits what happens on the job: users rarely notice a cluster until a node goes away and their session either survives or does not.

1Z0-078 Preparation Guide

The practitioner's advantage on this exam is that you can study it the way you would build it. A bottom-up plan means every new topic rests on one you have already worked through, and it keeps you from memorising RAC behaviour that you cannot explain.

Step 1: Build or borrow a lab you can break

Reading alone will not carry you through 77 questions on clustered systems. You need a two-node lab, or access to one, where you can stop Clusterware, pull a node, fill a disk group and watch what happens. Keep a log of each test. When a question later describes a symptom, you will have seen it.

Step 2: Start with Grid Infrastructure

Begin with the installation planning topics, because the exam asks about them directly and because they force you to understand the networks a cluster needs. Then install Grid Infrastructure and walk the startup sequence until you can explain what starts before what.

Spend real time on the OCR and voting files. Oracle's 19c documentation has a detail worth noticing here. The Clusterware guide says Clusterware files must be stored on ASM, yet the 19c changes page of the RAC Administration and Deployment Guide records that, starting with Grid Infrastructure 19c, the desupport of direct placement of OCR and voting files on shared file systems is rescinded for Oracle Standalone Clusters. Know both statements and which cluster type each applies to; that is exactly the kind of distinction a question can turn on.

Finish the layer with OCR backup and recovery, node addition and deletion, and policy-based management. Server pools come back later in the RAC topics, so understanding them here saves time.

Step 3: Move to ASM

Create disk groups at each redundancy level and look at the result. Oracle's ASM overview gives you rules you can test in a lab:

• Normal redundancy disk groups require at least two failure groups, and high redundancy disk groups at least three.
• If you omit the failure group specification, ASM places each disk in its own failure group (Exadata cells excepted).
• You cannot alter the redundancy level of a disk group after it is created.
• Allocation unit sizes can be 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 or 64 MB, depending on the disk group compatibility level.
• ASM starts a rebalance automatically after you add, drop or resize disks, the power setting controls its speed, and databases can stay operational while it runs.

Then set up Flex ASM, change its cardinality, and work through ACFS: a volume, a file system on it, a snapshot, and at least one of the advanced features. The CloudFS topics hold nine objective lines between them, which is more than many candidates expect from the storage side.

Step 4: Finish with RAC

Now the RAC topics read as consequences of what sits underneath. Oracle's Introduction to Oracle RAC in the 19c RAC guide covers the ideas the exam builds on:

• Cache Fusion uses the private interconnect for communication between instances, which is why the guide tells you not to use the interconnect for user traffic.
• The Global Cache Service and the Global Enqueue Service coordinate buffer cache blocks and enqueues in the Global Resource Directory.
• SCAN is a single network name, in DNS or Grid Naming Service, that round-robins to three IP addresses, and Oracle recommends that all client connections use it.
• DBCA creates one default database service, which Oracle says should be reserved for maintenance; you create dynamic services for application connections.
• RAC One Node runs a single instance of a RAC-enabled database on one node under normal operations, can relocate online with no downtime for users, and needs at least one dynamic database service.

Work the connection topics in the lab with a real client. Configure services, kill an instance, and watch what FAN, TAF and Application Continuity do. Then cover backup and recovery, tuning with AWR and ADDM, patching, and the multitenant topics.

Step 5: Read the objectives back as questions

In the last week, go through all 115 objective lines and turn each into a question you could answer out loud. "Explain the scope and capabilities of what-if command evaluation" becomes "what does SRVCTL evaluate mode report, and when would I run it?" Any line you cannot answer goes back to the lab.

Benefits and Career Scope of the 1Z0-078 Certification

The honest benefit of 1Z0-078 is that it names, in an employer's language, work that is otherwise hard to show on paper. A résumé line that says "supported RAC" can mean anything from running one SRVCTL command to rebuilding a cluster after a failed patch. An Oracle Certified Professional credential for RAC, ASM and Grid Infrastructure tells a reader that you were tested on the whole stack, including the storage and cluster layers that many database administrators never touch directly.

It also changes the work you get asked to do. Teams that run clustered Oracle databases need people who can plan an installation, patch Grid Infrastructure with minimal downtime, recover the OCR, and explain to an application team why their sessions dropped during a node failure. Those tasks map directly onto the exam topics, so preparing for the exam and becoming the person who handles those tickets are the same project.

There are limits worth stating. The credential is tied to Oracle Database 19c, and this article quotes no salary figures, because none comes from an official source. Oracle's exam page carried no retirement notice on 15 October 2026; check it again before you book, because Oracle updates its catalog.

The study itself has value even if you never sit the exam. Working through every objective line usually turns up at least one area, often ACFS, QoS Management or policy-based cluster management, that your current environment does not use and that you would otherwise meet for the first time during an incident.

Practice Test and Preparation Resources for 1Z0-078

Oracle's exam page links its recommended training. Three Oracle University courses on MyLearn line up with the three groupings of the syllabus, and their course pages show the module count and running time:

• Oracle Database 19c: Clusterware Administration Workshop: 13 modules, 12 h 18 min, covering Clusterware architecture, cluster configuration options, preinstallation and installation, node management, policy-based management, patching, troubleshooting and application high availability.
• Oracle Database 19c: ASM Administration Workshop: 13 modules, 8 h 7 min, covering ASM instances, Flex ASM, disk groups, files and templates, and ACFS with ADVM.
• Oracle Database 19c: RAC Administration Workshop: 14 modules, 20 h 11 min, covering installation, administration, patching, backup and recovery, tuning, services, connection high availability, RAC One Node, multitenant and QoS in RAC.

Together that is about 40 hours of video before any lab time. Taken in the order listed, Clusterware first and RAC last, the courses follow the same bottom-up path as this article.

Oracle's documentation

The 19c guides are free and they are the source the exam objectives are written against. Keep three open while you study: the Clusterware Administration and Deployment Guide, the Automatic Storage Management Administrator's Guide, and the Real Application Clusters Administration and Deployment Guide. When a course and a guide seem to disagree, the guide for your exact release wins.

Practice questions

Once each layer is done, test it. The free 1Z0-078 sample questions on DBExam show the multiple-choice style and make a quick check after a study block. A full timed practice exam is the better rehearsal for the 93-second pace, and DBExam offers one for 1Z0-078 alongside the free set. Use the score report to send you back to specific topics rather than retaking until the number looks good.

A short video on working through answer options

The DBExam YouTube channel has no 1Z0-078 video yet. The walk-through below is about a different Oracle exam, 1Z0-149 on PL/SQL programming, but its method carries over: read every option, rule out the ones that contradict a documented fact, and only then choose.

Conclusion

1Z0-078 lists its 30 topics with RAC first, Grid Infrastructure second and ASM last. A working cluster is built the other way round, and the most reliable way to prepare is to follow the build: Clusterware and the OCR and voting files, then ASM disk groups, Flex ASM and ACFS, then the RAC database, its services and its clients.

The format is fixed and published: 77 multiple-choice questions, 120 minutes, a 65% passing score, delivered online with a proctor. The topic list is long but concrete, and almost every line can be practised in a two-node lab. If the work it describes is the work on your desk, the exam mostly asks you to prove you understand why that work is done the way it is.

FAQs

How many questions are on the 1Z0-078 exam, and how long do I get?

Oracle's exam page lists 77 multiple-choice questions, 120 minutes and a 65% passing score. That is about 93 seconds a question. The exam is delivered as Proctored Online.

Does Oracle publish topic weights for 1Z0-078?

No. The exam page lists 30 topics with 115 objective lines: 49 for RAC, 41 for Grid Infrastructure and 25 for ASM. Those are line counts, not percentages, so use them to judge coverage, not to predict how many questions each area will get.

Where can the OCR and voting files live in Grid Infrastructure 19c?

Oracle's Clusterware guide says both must sit on shared storage reachable by every node, and that Clusterware files must be stored on ASM. The 19c changes page of the RAC guide adds that, from Grid Infrastructure 19c, the desupport of placing OCR and voting files directly on shared file systems is rescinded for Oracle Standalone Clusters. Learn both statements and the cluster type each one covers.

What is the default number of ASM instances in Flex ASM?

Three. Oracle's Managing Oracle Flex ASM chapter says the number of ASM instances is set with a cardinality setting and that the default is three instances. You can change it with SRVCTL.

Do I have to take Oracle's training before I book 1Z0-078?

The exam page offers recommended training: the Clusterware, ASM and RAC administration workshops on MyLearn, about 40 hours combined. The page does not state a course requirement. Check Oracle's Certification Program Guidelines for the credential before you book.

What should I bring to the online 1Z0-078 session?

A government-issued identification, a computer that meets Oracle's minimum system requirements, and a testing space that meets Oracle's rules. Check in 30 minutes before the exam time. Your result appears on screen at the end, and the detailed score report is in Oracle CertView. If you need to reschedule, do it at least 24 hours before your appointment.