Re: Daniel morgan and other DBA's ur advice on oracle carrier path

From: makbo <makbo_at_pacbell.net>
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 17:20:16 GMT
Message-ID: <kxyPb.14179$R95.8091@newssvr25.news.prodigy.com>

Daniel Morgan wrote:
> Comments in-line.
>
> hrishy wrote:
>

>> Hi Daniel
[...]
>

>> 3)Merging of the sys admin and the DBA roles in organisations

>
>
> Not likely to happen. The skills and expertise are very different. That
> is not to say some organizations don't mix positions but I see the skill
> sets as being different and not overlapping anytime soon.
>

[...]

>> 3)many a times i have backed up as a sysdamin on digital unix sun and
>> linux ssytems..just becoz management thought that they cannot afford a
>> seperate sysadmin.

>
>
> I have too. The last time that happened I built a Sun E450 from scratch
> and I can tell you for a fact they were ill served having me take a week
> to do what a good SA could have done in one day.
>

Or, you might say they were well-served in the long run, because they now had one person with the knowledge and experience to meet business needs that previously required two people!

I have been a both a Unix sysadmin and an Oracle DBA for well over a decade, and I would say the skill set for success in either area is the same. A successful DBA can be a successful sysadmin, and vice versa, if the desire is there.

Unfortunately, organizational politics frequently prevents the potential from being achieved... (as in, "I'm not gonna give the DBA the root password" and "I'm not gonna give the Unix admin the SYSTEM password"). Those who want to have a wall between the Sysadmin and the DBA almost always do so out of insecurity.

Successful DBA's and Sysadmins share the following:

basic troubleshooting - this is skill #1. Don't make assumptions about what is the cause and what is the symptom of a given problem. You can *never* be sure you know the problem or have fixed it until you can reliably reproduce it.
system programming - Perl, PL/SQL, C, shell scripts, Java -- I have written my own and maintained what others have written, often long after the original author was gone. Good programming and bad programming manifest themselves pretty much the same way everywhere.
self-learning. Reading Unix man pages and reading Oracle's SQL Reference documents are pretty much the same thing. You need the persistence to re-read and experiment on-line until you get it, no matter how long it takes. And you have to keep up with the new stuff.
experience - your own and others. The lessons of one mistake are often worth more than those of many successes. Perhaps the hardest lesson to learn is that today's quick fix shortcut will almost always become tomorrow's costly mess.
quality -- you're not done until you check your own work, whether that means re-booting the system, re-loading the database, or whatever.

That's it.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this set of attributes applies to a lot of jobs. My dad was a successful auto repair garage owner for many years, and I have no doubt that what made him a good mechanic is the same thing that makes me a good DBA and sysadmin.

And, of course, there are many jobs where these attributes alone won't help much: social worker, salesperson, business executive, and so on.

--Mark Bole Received on Wed Jan 21 2004 - 11:20:16 CST