Oracle DBA team management

I have been looking high and low for information on DBA "best practices" from a management perspective. I am young (20s) with a rich IT experience but only five years experience in database and app server administration, at only two shops. Both shops were "shoot-from-the-hip" shops with smart people who knew what they were doing but no documentation or structure. A month ago I was hired to lead and grow a team of DBAs at a growing company that also has treated the DBA role haphazardly. (To wit: no backups; developers had total control of production; no standards re: managing accounts, ensuring security, simulating recovery, etc.; no separation of responsibilities or clear idea of what DBAs are responsible for what.)

I've addressed most of the technical issues (we have backups!) but now I have to grow the team as well as structure it. I've found very little information online about what practices work well. Should we have a separation of duties between application and system DBAs? What are good on-call schedules to try? What sorts of topics should be covered regularly at DBA team meetings? How to manage application server and database server responsibilities within the same team? What are good interview strategies? What kind of "DBA standards" do other shops follow? How should developers and DBAs interact? And so on!

I've managed development teams but this is an entirely different can of worms. I can find 5,000 posts on hit ratios but there seems to be very little discussion about "how DBA teams work" at different shops. I'd welcome any thoughts or discussion on this, and especially any pointers to sites, forums, posts, books or other resources that focus on the mechanics of IT management, especially DBA management. Received on Thu Sep 02 2004 - 13:40:14 CDT