How to evaluate the competency of a DBA
October 8, 2009
eWeek
writer
Judy Mottl has a fascinating new series of articles on
Oracle technology.
In her first installment we see advice for IT managers on how to tell
of you have hired a competent DBA. DBA's are notorious
difficult to evaluate because managers don't fully understand what
they do, deep in the bowels of the database. They can be terse,
nerdish and mysterious, and many a manager has wondered out loud of
their DBA really knows what they are doing.
A good DBA will often automate themselves out of a job after
their first year, becoming like George Jetson, walking into the office
and mashing a single button.
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It's important to recognize that a database administrator
is a manager, with a job that requires both well-structured
and semi-structured tasks. A good DBA knows how to
automate the well-structured components of their job to free
them up for more challenging work. |
In the real world, large corporations will often
hire Remote DBA
services whereby Oracle experts can install scripts to relieve a
production DBA of the tedious repetitive tasks and free them up to
perform the advanced tasks required to properly administer mission
critical databases.
Her article notes that a competent DBA is able to automate many
basic database administration tasks, and ensure that the database runs
hands-free, by applying decision rules to detect impending problem and
fixing them before they cripple the database:
"Consider the scenario in which one database system
actually ran for a year and a half without needing any hands-on
tweaking.
The reason? The DBA not only automated every and any
aspect but implemented add-on technologies for system monitoring and
recovery needs."
Oracle
ACE Andy Kerber explains these issues in his book the "Oracle
DBA Job Interview Handbook", that a good DBA is proficient in
shell scripting and writing scripts to automate the well-structured
components of the DBA job role (especially monitoring and error
detection).
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