On DBA Survivor, Thomas LaRock blogged about “Finding a Good DBA“. This is a reply.
I mostly agree what what LaRock said. Managers believe databases fall into the same category as email servers and domain name servers. System administrators are expected to take care of them all. And, having been a SysAdmin myself, I know as long as the thing is working they’re good.
I was also an application developer for a number of years as well. From that point of view, you are working as fast as you can while still trying to make your code run as fast as it can. You don’t have full access to the SQL servers. You might test a few different SQL queries to see witch is faster, but you can’t get access to the configuration files. Asking the SysAdmin to change from RAID-5 to RAID-10 would be crazy talk.
Now I’m a DBA. I understand you can have all the computer systems and program code you want, without business data you are just playing games.
I don’t understand why upper managers don’t give more attention and resources to their data. Theses days lots of business don’t product anything. Nike doesn’t make shoes. They product information called marketing. This is true of many “new age” companies.
A good DBA is someone who 1) understands the software your using (MySQL, Oracle, DB2, MSsql) 2) understands your business 3) understands your coding processes (Structured programming, Object-oriented, Scrum, Extreme Programming) and 4) can write code.
Good Luck finding such a person.
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Guess you need a good manager to know to hire a good DBA! I think in a lot of cases a company doesn’t need a dedicated DBA at least on the smaller end, the last 3 companies I was at was like this, one of the three used a DB consulting shop which gave good results.
The big problem with finding a good DBA is well like any good person they are hard to come by, and demand usually significantly higher salaries than say a good network guy or a good systems guy. Add to that many places the amount of real DBA work is minimal, but you do want the resource available when you really need it. And for the occasional audit on performance/scalability or whatever.
Because of this good DBAs will get bored at most places pretty quick. assuming you can even find one to begin with. The last company I was at was still running MSSQL 2000, didn’t have transaction logging enabled on their production databases, and didn’t have standby databases, and their in house DBAs (two of them over a span of a few years) missed the most simple setting to improve performance – allocate more memory to the database.
We had servers with 32GB of memory but the database was only configured to use less than 4GB of that. The DBs were not heavily used though, they were data warehouses that were active for about 1 hour a day (great candidates for virtualization though I left before I got to that point in the consolidation). Without the databases though most things would grind to a screeching halt.
Link | September 17th, 2010 at 10:41 am