Re: Oracle DBA to PostGreSQL DBA?

I'm just now entering the second half of my career. I focused heavily on Oracle in the first half, and had a personal dilemma on what to do moving forward.

As it sits today; a number of business units within my company are now using MySQL for a growing list of products. We (the DBA team) have been asked to take on a fair portion of this support. Tim is correct that no other database has a feature set like Oracle's. In practice, however, many applications that don't make great use of these advanced features. These apps could be run in a less feature rich database without a loss of functionality or availability. Experience here is going to be very organizationally diverse.

I have no direct experience with Postgres, but having taken on MySQL I have a few thoughts on branching out: it's felt great growing my knowledge base while we expand our support. In the last few years the recruiter calls have more frequently been interested in my MySQL skills at a higher initial advertised rate. It's anecdotal evidence with a sample size of 1, but in my case it's been a recognizable trend.

5 years ago I thought people were crazy by not jumping into the deep end on one technology. Today I have a much different outlook. I enjoy working on multiple DB's and their differences in architecture. In many ways I feel it's strengthened my skills through differing perspective. One thing is for certain, looking back at my last 3 or 4 jobs, each of them were landed in part due to soft skills and a wholistic look at an environment rather than a laser focus on one component. Many of those skills are easily transferred between databases. You're still carrying your experience along with you, the difference is that your tools and metrics now look a little different.

As with Tim, I haven't jumped completely into the other arena yet, but I have strongly considered it. Starting fresh on a new DB is something you have to be committed to, but it certainly isn't something I look back on as a bad move.

> On Dec 16, 2016, at 9:51 AM, Tim Gorman <tim.evdbt_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> You can get great online training from EnterpriseDB for a few hundred dollars. They're always having sales and giving out discounts, but even at full-price the training is well worth it, especially for those with experience with other databases.
>
> I don't think the market for PostgreSQL expertise is strong or sustained, and I don't think it provides many decent paying jobs by itself. I do think that having PostgreSQL expertise in addition to Oracle or DB2 or MSSQL increases one's value, especially for specific projects or products (i.e. Greenplum, etc).
>
> The PostgreSQL feature set does not begin to compare to Oracle, DB2, or MSSQL, so I've only seen it used for embedded application repositories, but not for mission-critical enterprise database usage. Someone might be able to cite to the contrary?
>
> I jumped at the opportunity to learn PostgreSQL on my own dime, and I enjoyed the project where it was used, and I still appreciate that experience, but I have not made my paycheck dependent on it.
>
> Just my US$0.02...
>
>
>
> On 12/16/16 08:19, Mike Killough wrote:

>> Hi DBA's,
>> 
>> I have been an Oracle DBA now for 20+ years and am maybe a little set in my ways. It is possible that at the company that I work at we might convert from Oracle to PostGreSQL in the future to save on licensing costs. I'm on the tail end of my career and part of me thinks it would be fun to do something different. The other part thinks I have too much invested in Oracle.
>> 
>> I was curious what others on this list think. Bad career move? Decent paying jobs for PostGreSQL DBA's? Feature rich enough to be a good choice for a small company enterprise database?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Mike

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