Re: survey - DBA structure in your company ?
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:13:21 -0500
Message-ID: <49D6B431.9090207_at_ardentperf.com>
I think we're somewhere in the ballpark of 8000+ databases. There is a little of both approaches, but more of #1. It also differs slightly over the large divisions of the company (there were mergers in the past). We have a small group that plans deployment, monitoring, how all the infrastructure will work, which versions of Oracle we will deploy, etc. Then a slightly larger group who actually rolls out the systems at the request of application teams and maintains them. Some application teams have dedicated DBA's but not all. The really big apps (with multi-TB databases) often have people on the app team who manage the entire environment and may or may not use the practices developed by the small "engineering" group. There are chargebacks associated with many of these services and the app teams are our customers.
Naturally there are other groups for storage and platform/OS - with their own smaller engineering teams. And of course we all have to work together quite a bit. It's all pretty complicated (we're quite large) and I don't have good perspective on the whole organization, this is just how it seems to be working from where I'm standing.
It's nice to be able to focus deeply on one area - I don't just utilize Oracle knowledge but also SAN, NAS, unix (lots of flavors)... a lot of cool stuff. And it can be cool when it enables you to tackle bigger projects than you could otherwise. (Like massive amounts of mirrored ASM storage and crazy fast SSD!) But it's true what someone else said about having to keep your broader skills up-to-date. I'm glad I had a lot of experience in other areas (like SQL tuning and schema objects and app development) before I started with this job. Although personally I really enjoy the system side so I'm happy to be where I am at the moment.
-Jeremy
DEEDSD_at_nationwide.com wrote:
>
> We are a reasonably large corporation, with 650 Oracle databases. We
> are having a bit of internal discussion going on concerning different
> support models:
>
> (1) Having separation of duties for DBAs: one DBA area in responsible
> for infrastructure across all databases and another group doing
> application DBA work across multiple application databases, closer to
> the applications and their data or
> (2) Doing DBA work in silos: one DBA would be responsible for a
> certain set of applications and databases end-to-end, responsible for
> all infrastructure and application data work for that set of applications
>
> We currently have a structure like this:
>
> We have systems DBAs that are responsible for the database
> infrastructure - installing the server software & patching, tuning at
> the instance level, monitoring db server capacity, backup & recovery,
> adding sizing datafiles, disaster recovery, database creation, user &
> security administration, 24x7 level 3 support.
>
> We have application DBAs that are closer to the application data, and
> are responsible for creating and maintaining the application schema
> objects (tables, indexes, etc), some SQL statement tuning, logical
> backups (exp/imp) of application objects, data loads, 24x7 level 2
> support.
>
> I am curious what other folks are doing.
-- Jeremy Schneider Chicago, IL http://www.ardentperf.com -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Fri Apr 03 2009 - 20:13:21 CDT