Seeking Advice

I have been a DBA for about 5 years. During that time I have gone from looking after 1 small Oracle database (~200Mb) on a reasonably powerful machine, to looking after 6 databases. (The largest being about 40Gb, and about 2-3 million new rows each day).

When people talk about a 5 year DBA with 1 or 2 years experience, I look at myself, and can see more or less where they are coming from. I have never had to deal with a serious failure. (At the worst, I have had to replace broken disks, but they were part of a RAID (1 or 5) anyway). I have tested recovery by deliberately breaking test databases. However when you know exactly what's broken it's usually fairly easy to fix it as well.

I have dabbled in replication using snapshots, snapshot logs, and refresh groups. I later decided that this wasn't appropriate for the task for which I was using it. I have implemented partitioning on my 40Gb database (It's actually a 28 day rolling window. The data is financial price ticks (shares, exchange rates etc), and is only really useful for a week or 3, so it's thrown away after that.) I have upgraded 7.3 to 8i. I have installed, and used WebDB, and to a much lesser extent portal. I have used import, export, sqlldr, and dabbled with an Oracle names server.

I have taken 3 of the 5 8i DBA OCP exams. I picked the exams that I was confident of passing without having to spend more than a day studying. (The study was to check to see what was expected for each exam. Although I don't want to rekindle the argument over what the OCP is worth)

I would say that I have a reasonably broad, but not necessarily deep knowledge of IT. I started out originally on a helpdesk doing support, I have done some development in VB, and Java, and even briefly dabbled in forms. I have a reasonable understanding of TCP/IP, and networks in general. Before moving into IT, I was a data analyst, looking at financial data. (I wrote a lot of queries against sybase databases)

My role is not as a pure DBA, I am often involved in various development, and support tasks varying from creating a VB macro in excel to speed up a task for a data analyst, through to planning, writing, and implementing the migration of legacy data from 3 data sources into a new data model on a single database. (About 4Gb of data)

I would like to pursue a career that is more geared towards a DBA role. All of my current databases run on Windows NT/2K. With my history in support, I am more than happy with my understanding of NT/2K architecture. For my next move however It is likely that I will need to support Oracle on platforms other than windows. What advice would you give me regards my future career progression? I am looking to get hold of a copy of Red Hat 8 professional, and I will be installing Oracle on this to play, and learn. (Yes, before anyone points it out, I know that only Red Hat advanced server is supported, and not professional.) :-)

Will learning redhat linux give me a good enough understanding to be able to apply that knowledge to other flavours of linux, or even unix? What other areas do you think I should be looking into?

If you were an employer looking for a DBA, what sort of level job do you think I would be suitable for?

Thanks for getting this far, and I look forward to any/all responses.

Adrian

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Adrian Carlson-Hedges