Question: I am a junior DBA and I
was wondering about the job titles in large organizations
and the hierarchy of job titles for Oracle DBA employees.
Answer:
Because
Oracle DBA professionals command high salaries, many are
given honorary job titles. These include fellows titles such
as the Apple fellow, whereby the corporation grants special
privileges to Oracle employees granted fellow status. Other
Oracle DBA superstar titles include vice president of
database administration, chief technologist, and the new job
title (used by Bill Gates), chief software architect.
In a large corporate organization with dozens of DBA's
there is a hierarchy of DBA job titles. The head DBA
is usually a vice president, reporting directly to the CFO,
just like the VP of software development and the VP of
systems administration. This is because the DBA area
must be free of undue influences from the systems
development management.
Under the VP of Database Administration
we see the following job titles:
- Manager of database administration:
This job title can also be Director of database
administration.
- Senior DBA: This is a DBA job
title normally reserved for a DBA with more than 10 year
of full time experience.
- Junior DBA: This is for a
newly graduated college person.
In addition, we also see these specialty DBA job titles:
- Database Architect: This job
title is done for a DBA charged with designing new
databases.
- Data Administrator: This DBA
job title is charged with managing and enforcing data
naming standards (PL/SQL variable names, table names,
column names, schema names, etc.)
- Database system engineer: This
DBA job title is for software engineers who write
low-level routines (such as Linux I/O drivers and system
internals work).
- Medical Informaticist: This
is a DBA with an MD degree, normally the end-user
liaison in a hospital between the DBA's and the doctors.
- Database Engineer: In the
USA, this job title requires an advanced college degree
in engineering,
hand it is commonly used my questionable consultants
without a 4-year software engineering degree.
Also see my notes on
how to become an Oracle DBA.
