Re: To be or not to be a DBA

brsanthu_at_yahoo.com (Santhosh Kumar) wrote in message news:<9daf2a44.0402121001.dc61fdf_at_posting.google.com>...
> Hi All,
>
> I have been working in this industry for more than 6 years and have
> good experience in J2ee (Design and development) and Oracle
> (development and dev admin) (lots other like vb and c++, although they
> are not my primary skills).
>
> I had always been curious about Oracle and wanted to know in detail
> about the same. So around one and half years back, I took the
> certification and completed 8i recently. I started mere out of
> curiosity but learned a lot in detail at the end of whole process. Now
> I'm thinking, as I have completed the cert and also have good amount
> of knowledge in Oracle administration, to get into the DBA profession.
> As everybody else, obviously I'm looking for some lucrative career.
>
> Any suggestions are welcome regd,
> 1. Whether to get into the dba profession or not

remmeber its difficult for honest professionals to get a break.well honest i mean..if you are begineer i am unlikely to hire you unless you spice up your resume.many shops i know off run a wide variety of Databases and a whole lotta of versions..These are the shops that will hire and would continue to hire DBA's.(I have worked for large banks and defence org..)The IT decisions there are governed by monetray aspects basically economics of business and they are not carried away by the newer and newer relaeses of oracle..So The CIO's there would require DBA's to have knowledge from 7.0..way upwards...

There is tremendous presurre given the cost cutting to pick up other DB skills..like sybase (I know its not dead as oracle claims out it to be in its marketing campaigns) Db2 etc etc..

> 2. Is dba is any lucrative career than J2ee architecture and design?

Yes DBA is lucrative and as challenging and interesting as J2EE..J2EE guys came out Java Server Faces..Oracle has something interesting like getting XML out of 7.3 database ..:-)or webenabling 7.3 database..developments are taking plae in the database design to..so now its no longer rows and columns any more..(it never was i think).Or knowing that if you use long columns to store XML and at a later stages the client demands replication..

> 3. Or any other thoughts you have regd this

Now comes the Job market..well for many companies..the DBA and developer ratio is skewed towards the developers..a typical organisation might be having 100 developers and 1 DBA..so you can understand how the job market would be..

Its important DBA's understand about development.Tuning security and architecting are the three things that comes to my mind why DBA' should understand development.I was working on a project where the application used OLE DB to acesses a oracle Database 9.2..and the passwords were stored in clear text in file from where a component would make a connection to the oracle database..(proxy authentication is not supported in 9i with ole DB.) and the client had to compromise on security ..This was discovered when the project was about to complete..

regards
Hrishy

>
> Santhosh.
Received on Sat Feb 14 2004 - 23:32:51 CST