Re: How many DBA's?

Jane,

Currently I am the new guy in a large shop ( ~200 applications, 75 instances, 40 servers, 3 OS platforms), in my last job I was essentially where you are now ( 3 major applications, 12 instances, 5 servers, 1 OS platform). Here are my thouhts.

While your systems are in flux I agree with your approach. Get some jr dba's, I think 3 or 4 should be about right. Assign each staff member as primary and secondary responsibilities for the application. This way they can feel some pride of ownership but see the value in cooperation. Share the on-call with everyone to encourage cooperation. Your role is to set and monitor the shop standards and insure a solid architechure. This approach worked well for me as the Sr DBA in a small shop.

In my current position we have ~30 DBA's. Each DBA is assigned to a set of applications as the primary contact. That DBA handles both development support tasks and production support for their applications. On-call duties rotate through the team. We have well defined standards so it is fairly straight forward to provide the on-call support for any application. If an issue develops the on-call cannot handle, they contact the primary DBA for that application. This rarely happens. Since each DBA handles both development and production support we don't have an us vs them attitude.

Hope this helps.

Mark...   

On 21 Feb 2002 05:21:07 -0800, mooremj_at_dfo-mpo.gc.ca (Jane) wrote:

>I am in the process of trying to identify the resources requried for a
>Data Group within our organization. Currently, every group does its
>own database administration. This new data group would be responsible
>for maintaining all databases and they would also be there as a
>resource for developers and business users. Basically the group would
>be responsible for doing all aspects of a DBA.
>The basic environment is:
>1 Mid-size Production OLTP
>1 Mid-size Production Warehouse
>4 smaller warehouse/reporting databases
>Designer
>OEM
>IAS
>I need to identify the number and level of DBA's that I require and of
>course justify the my recommendations. If anyone has any suggestions
>or knows of any research/information available I would greatly
>appreciate it.
>Thanks
>Jane
Received on Sat Feb 23 2002 - 01:36:52 CST