Re: Where does the DBA function sit in the organisation structure?

A very good question Brian with as many answers as DBA's on this newsgroup.

The main question really is how many DBA's do you want?

if you want to keep the number of DBA's you employee low, then consider a central team which spans the project lifecycle for all of your companies projects, implement standard builds, and initiate a remote monitoring regime using Industry standard tools.

This has a number of benefits, including:-

1. Holiday cover.
2. New projects are not a complete surprise to the production DBA as they will have helped design and develop it.
3. Some of the wilder developer ideas are shot down before they can get off of the ground.
4. Reduced resourcing levels.
5. Transfer of skills across the team.

If however you don't mind how many DBA's you employ then have one for each project, of course this leaves you open to many problems, most of which are the exact opposite of the benfits described above.

You will however have specialists who know your product inside out from the developer point of view, your production team will have to rely on the, no doubt, impeccable documentation produced by the development team.

I obviously favour the central team approach, but then again I've worked in both scenarios.

Glenn Berry,
Principal Consultant DBA.

Brian Cameron wrote in message <364BA077.52D3C58_at_metz.une.edu.au>...
>Hi everyone,
>
>I'd really like to generate some discussion on this to get a feel for
>both what is "Industry Best Practice" and "what is happening in reality"
>
>We are in the middle of considering a restructure of our Information
>Systems group and one of the issues which has come up is where does the
>DBA function sit.
>
>TIA
>
>Brian
>bcamero5_at_metz.une.edu.au
>
>
Received on Thu Nov 26 1998 - 00:00:00 CST