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

forbrich_at_telusplanet.net said...
> 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.
>

Thanks for the kind words ... that I snipped out. :)

On your primary gripe, I'm not sure that the current tight financial environment can be blamed on GUIs. My experience is that management usually has no clue what the technical people actually do ... whether they use a GUI or the command-line. I have had bosses who stand over my shoulder when I work ... but thankfully not often. The others never see how I accomplish my assigned tasks.

As for your second statement (gripe), I have to agree. Many times using a GUI will only get you so far ... and you have to switch over to nonGUI  mode to complete a task. However, I also find that's true no matter what tool I use ... and also in other fields (like when you buy a car with "standard" features, but you wish the designer would have added your favorite feature).

Personally, I like the "Create like" command in OEM ... and the "spreadsheet" result set in Toad, compared to the Solaris command-line sqlplus for a table with lots of columns.

-- 
/Karsten
DBA > retired > DBA