RE: New Post on DBA 3.0 on my blog

From: Goulet, Richard <Richard.Goulet_at_parexel.com>
Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2011 11:50:47 -0400
Message-ID: <6B0D50B70F12BD41B5A67F14F5AA887F1025DA69_at_us-bos-mx022.na.pxl.int>



Robert,  

    Read your blog entry and it seems that you've BTDT, which I have as well. Corporate culture does get in the way, so doesn't upper management prejudice. At one time this place use to be HP-UX and Linux period. Now it's Windoze and SUN Solaris. Reason, change in the IT corner office and not for the better. For the life of me I can't figure out why Linux isn't a Unix based operating system in their minds. Maybe it's the hardware that looks, smells, and feels like it should be a Windows environment. Or possibly that they believe that Unix can only run on large, expensive hardware. Maybe it's their opinion that only Windows runs on x86 based stuff. Who knows, I can't figure it out.  

    Which leads to a lot of the problems with trying to be a DBA 3.0. Many times before the party announcements are sent out the hardware and OS, and sometimes even the RDBMS are already a done deal, no room for change. A project I was involved with not that long ago the development tools were already selected, purchased, and a number of people already hired to make it happen. The Operations/sysadmins and us were only expected to install and power it up. Heck, even the data model had been created by an outside consultant with no input from the techies in house. And I wish it was one off incident. We've a data warehouse being built by consultants in the UK who were so cavalier as to toss the data model built here without comment or consideration. They came up with a beast that takes hours to ELT and we're suppose to make it replicate to several sites at 15 minute intervals, yeah right. OH, BTW no one told the network folks either who are now up in arms because we consume so much bandwidth all day. And this project didn't think it was necessary to budget for hardware and software to house the database or web servers, because they could piggy back on existing installations. After all, it's just another Oracle or Tomcat instance isn't it??? Same consideration for DR too. And the portal developers are going nuts too since their screens that worked just dandy on the old data model now crawl because according to the consultants, you don't need indexes, they only slow things down. And did I mention that this is a totally denormalized schema? 1GB in, 100GB out. OH Bother!!  

    So it was a real surprise when I was invited to a party last week where all of the pieces only exist on paper and that hand scrawled to boot. Nothing set in concrete, lots not even thought about other than to put a place holder on the paper. Nice, they handed me a sheet with nothing but questions on it that started with "Can we...." or "Is it possible...." or "What if....". This one is shaping up to be fun.    

Dick Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA/NA Team Leader  


From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Robert Freeman Sent: Sunday, April 24, 2011 2:55 PM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: New Post on DBA 3.0 on my blog

More posted on my blog about my thoughts on DBA's today and what we need to do to move towards being the DBA of tomorrow. I'm calling it DBA 3.0..... Give it a look and let's see what you think!

http://robertgfreeman.blogspot.com/2011/04/changing-world-of-dba-part-2- dba-30.html  

Robert G. Freeman
Master Principal Consultant, Oracle Corporation, Oracle ACE Author of various books on RMAN, New Features and this shorter signature line.
Blog: http://robertgfreeman.blogspot.com

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Received on Mon Apr 25 2011 - 10:50:47 CDT

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