Re: Oracle DBA

> FWIW - I would never hire a "paper DBA";
> which is a person with a "certificate" but
> no hands on knowledge or real world experience.

Many people in this newsgroup have told me the same thing in the past.

>
> What I find interesting is that you neglected
> to say what YOUR experience in the IT world is
> or what you ENJOY doing.

I (mostly) program in C and (seldomly) in C++.

> From my perspective, everybody should do what they
> ENJOY doing to keep food on the table. Life is too
> short to be miserable 5 days a week.

I agree. My salary is competitive also, but money is not everything for me. This is the reason why I want to switch to databases, which I've always been interested in.

>
> In companies which have 1 or more "full time DBAs"
> the vast majority of those companies by count have
> only ONE DBA. Typically the whole company runs off
> the database; which means when the DB goes down,
> the WHOLE company ceases to function. At least this
> is what happens in my company. With a company that
> typically does $200,000 per HOUR in sales, the DBA is
> under extreme pressure to get the DB up & keep it up.
> If you don't like that kind of pressure, then maybe
> you don't want to become a DBA.
>

This is a very good point. I am known to be pretty good at joggling between different tasks and at working under pressure. At the same time, I realize that the kind of pressure a DBA has to deal with may be of a different nature. I guess I will never know until I become a DBA myself.

This brings to another question:

Are DBAs allowed to take long vacations, or do companies discourage their DBAs from doing that considering the database may crash?

Thanks again. Received on Thu Sep 20 2001 - 13:39:55 CDT