RE: DBA Skill tree
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 10:27:50 -0500
Message-ID: <AD0CB572A820AB4E8E52ABD38950FD3605EF18DC_at_a0001-xpo0150-s.hodc.ad.allstate.com>
I suppose that depends... there's the old-school "that's how we did things in v6, and that's good enough for me" old-school, and there's the old-school "I've always loved all the new features, it makes a rich beautiful tapestry of my ever-growing and ever-changing Oracle knowledge" old-school. If it's the former, then, yeah, a newbie with an OCP is a better find, but just nothing is going to beat the latter.
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Dan Norris
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 9:41 AM
To: gurenich_at_gmail.com
Cc: sacrophyte_at_gmail.com; Oracle L
Subject: Re: DBA Skill tree
Maria,
I hope you mean that experience should be a contributor, but not the *only* factor. While I agree that many "old school" DBAs could handle issues more readily than some newbies, I'd say that most of the "old school" DBAs I've encountered in my consulting travels are the "out of touch" type. That is, they have lost most of the theory and have maintained the same environment(s) for so long that the problems they can solve are the ones that happen regularly to them. They faint/fail at new or unknown issues. That is my personal experience and the new or unknown issues weren't particularly tough ones. I'd say I've been asked to provide help (consulting) to more "old school" DBAs than newbies over my years. However, that's probably also because the "old school" DBAs are often in larger shops that have bigger environments (and usually bigger problems to go with them).
I agree that experience should be a factor, but I also acknowledge that as a consultant working on issues for 2-3 weeks at a time, I was able to gain more relative experience (i.e. seeing/solving more problems) than many "old school" DBAs would see in several years. That's just the nature of break-fix consulting. I describe it like dog years (and it feels like that sometimes too!).
Summary: "Experience" means different things in different situations.
Dan
On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Maria Gurenich <gurenich_at_gmail.com> wrote:
Well, how about years of experience for starters? IMHO, OCP with 2 years of experience could not beat old school DBA with 10 years of experience even though the newbie thinks that he/she knows all new features. I haven't had chance to wrote down my thoughts, but being on a couple of interview so far, I end up with something like this:
newbie - from school to 2 yrs of experience, is able to maintain database without unexpected downtimes, is able to make, test and keep backups and recovery and even if doesn't know for sure, feels with his/her guts where the problem is.
standart - 2-5 yrs, includes all basics, is able to assess, judge, improve the existing strategies, is able to predict and plan before hand, understands company's benefits "using RMAN instead of hotbackups", does not need significant amount of time to figure out where the problem is, is ready with the correct (reasonable) answer for almost all questions.
advanced - 7+ yrs, should be standart for all these years, and also be an expert in non-standart features: RAC, HA, RASP, architecture design.. Should be heavily involved in business part of the deal, meaning that he/she not only maintains his/her databases, but totally understands the business needs and the impact of downtime. This would be somebody who understands hardware part, is able to distinguish between small nuances, has a solid knowledge of database internals, is able to work productively without any gudget/tool, e.g. can fix anything from the command line balancing his/her laptop on the knee. Somebody who is able to train newbie and standart, who understands that database IS for developers rather than something that he/she has to protect FROM developers. Please, don't underestimate this fact. I've seen a lot of experienced DBAs, who absolutely seriously think that their job is to protect the database from intruders like developers and end users. IMHO, these are obvious signs of unripeness.
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