Re: dba mentor

Hi Jeff

Like many of the other respondents, I never had a mentor (and the closest I had was, er, not very good). I have however seen mentoring take place and it's definitely a highly useful approach for a short while (say 9-18 months). Probably the key skills a mentor can help with are the soft ones.

• dealing with customers
• knowing when and how to say no (and yes)
• knowing how other departments/silos work and who the key contacts are
• knowing how to judge the reliability of a source (no-one seems to teach that these days)
• a healthy scepticism that new software releases work as intended
• a healthy scepticism in one's own ability. (the easiest person to fool is yourself)

Technical skills *can* be taught and/or picked up from good online resources. Like the others here online communities (this list, Usenet, Oracle forums, serverfault, twitter) have proven invaluable to me for this purpose. The quality of the answers you get back definitely increases as you contribute yourself - which can be a catch-22. If you have a good local usergroup (i.e not one that's all Oracle speakers or vendors) or meetup then those are pretty valuable as well.

It's also very valuable to have a lab/laptop environment of your own to break, I mean experiment in.

On Tue, Aug 21, 2018 at 8:53 PM Jeff Chirco <backseatdba_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> Did any of you have a mentor to help you along your DBA career path?
> Someone to coach you on what is right/wrong, offer advice for various
> projects, etc… I was the first DBA for my company and never had someone to
> go to for advice and such. I learned completely on the job besides going
> to some classes at the beginning and a couple conferences recently. And
> then some consultants over the years. I’ve always reported to a
> Programming manager, and they understand some of the job but not everything
> that needs to be done. Although I have been a DBA for over 10 years I feel
> there is still a ton for me to learn and be better at. I was alone for many
> years and did a lot of database development in addition to DBA duties. Kind
> of a jack of all trades expert at none. I am a lead now, we have one other
> DBA and maybe a third in the near future, but I know I can be a better
> leader and hope to advance that further.
>
> Did any of you have some kind of mentor during your career? For most of
> you it probably was someone inside the company but what about outside? How
> did you find this person and was it helpful? What did they do for you?
>
> Another other details or advice?
>
>
> Thanks,
>

-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info

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