Re: Where does the DBA sit?

I work for a large company with many DBA's and they all work under for the IT department with a Director that reports to the CIO.

The DBA's work as part of a team, the customer/end user, internal design and/or programming people and provide the 1000 ft view of why the system is designed the way it is, i.e.. explaining why a certain practice in the Order Entry will break the General Ledger database structures.

They provide the 100 ft view and consult with the application people, helping to translate and explain the business rules and supplying support by providing tables, constraints, triggers so the applications will utilize the power of the various databases.

What they do not perform is being the 10 ft gorilla that will fix any data corruption's due to poor design, bad luck, oops's that happens or support the End User requests for the data modifications such as doing a mass change from the old to new Area Code/Prefix numbers.

Our Operations sections will do the backups and maintain sufficient hardware availability and capacity to support the data. In our shop, a section of Operations will do some research to help identify problems with the aborted programs, making emergency changes to for critical path applications and sometimes the DBA's are consulted for their opinion. Changes to non-critical aborted programs are done through the Applications Development Department - another Director reporting to the CIO. We went though a transition period, driven by the CIO, for the separation of the DBA's from being the goto guys for 'fixing' data, the DBA's complaint that 'their' data has been abused by the Applications, and the End Users request for simple changes.

This was the subject of many heated discussions between the Directors for a while and has settled into an acceptable association. Our Auditors seem to like it, but who knows about those guys <G>..

Nabil Courdy wrote:

> I'd like to survey where different companies fit their production
> systems DBA teams within the IT organization.
>
> Does it come directly under the IT manager (CIO) or under the
> Operations Manager (person in charge of Systems who report to the IT
> Manager or CIO)?
>
> Nabil
> =====
Received on Wed Aug 01 2001 - 17:39:26 CDT