Re: Are Oracle GUIs causing a decline in DBA salaries?

Karsten Farrell wrote:

> I'm sorry, but I must be missing something here. Why are GUI users
> equated with unskilled, rank amateurs? Why is something that makes my
> job easier a bad thing? And what's wrong with providing tools to assist
> those who ain't an old goat like me (eg, newbie DBAs)?
>
> I didn't use GUIs with Oracle 5, 6, or 7 ... any more than I used a GUI
> to write my Fortran or Cobol programs ... but I don't see how a DBA who
> uses a GUI today is _less_ skilled than one who doesn't. Using the
> command line doesn't make a DBA _more_ skilled than one who doesn't.
>
> And in many cases, using a GUI does allow a DBA to do some tasks in half
> the time. If there's a GUI tool that helps me do my job, I use it. If
> there isn't a GUI tool available, then I do it the old-fashioned way.
>
> This idea that "real men don't use GUIs" is an old myth.

As usual, you have an entirely valid point. GUIs *can and should* be used as yet another tool in the toolbelt. It's the user, not the tool, that makes the difference! And I certainly have been pushing OEM (or other GUI admin tools) to my client base as much as possible because "anything is better than the nothing I see in use."

My experience, unfortunately, is that management tends to assume GUI based product needs less skill set so they can save big piles of money by understaffing and underskilling the positions. That is my primary gripe.

The other gripe I have against GUI is that, by it's very nature, the GUI leads you through a specific thought process and that process is provided by the GUI developer, not the user (and certainly not the user's exerience) so we have to pray that the tool designer has better experience and good reasons for the design. Witness the differences in PC-based accounting packages ... accounting engines are all basically the same (how many variations in accounting are really allowed???) but different users swear by this or that entirely package on the GUI and some users simply can not switch GUIs. Received on Mon Apr 28 2003 - 16:51:10 CDT