Re: Oracle DBA team management

swiego_at_hotmail.com (Ess Wiego) wrote in message news:<936daf3f.0409021040.3a93bfeb_at_posting.google.com>...

> I have been looking high and low for information on DBA "best
> practices" from a management perspective. I am young (20s) with a

Join the club...

> little information online about what practices work well. Should we
> have a separation of duties between application and system DBAs?

I'd say between development dbas (more focused on how to use features) and production dbas (more focused on solving problems, recovery). But by all means rotate them: makes the job interesting. Unless someone just plain doesn't want to do one of the jobs. That's fine as well.

> What
> are good on-call schedules to try?

The best on-call schedule is the off-call schedule. Go for no calls, period. Until then, make sure that there is remote access (leaving home to go to work in the middle of the night or weekend nowadays is just not an acceptable practice) and that the schedule is weekly. That seems to be the way it's always worked everywhere I've been.

> What sorts of topics should be
> covered regularly at DBA team meetings?

Schedules, client issues, "topic of the week", interesting past cases, topics sourced from the Internet forums, etc. Keep it half technical, half company-specific.

> How to manage application
> server and database server responsibilities within the same team?

You don't. Get someone trained in app server management and give them the job. Let them sort it out. The two environments are very different.

> What are good interview strategies?

I'll pass on this one.

> What kind of "DBA standards" do
> other shops follow?

I'm not very keen on "standards" per se. Always pisses me off when I walk into a site with problems caused by too restrictive standards. Let's get something straight here: standards are industry related practices usually established by organisations that do nothing else. After extensive consultation. And they get reviewed regularly, by people that do no other things.

That is not the environment in 99.99999999% of the sites out there. So, to want to establish "standards" for the sake of looking like having a standard is a useless exercise, patronising, pedantic and it can only lead to problems later on. It's just too complex a field for the vast majority of sites.

Cncentrate on guidelines or site practices. But avoid the dreadful "standard". I wish most shops would stop this "standards" thing. It achieves nothing most of the time. It is also directly responsible for half the myths out there about database administration.

> How should developers and DBAs interact?

I shall not go there. Or rather, if you want a little presentation on that subject, drop me an e-mail and I'll send something.

>
> I've managed development teams but this is an entirely different can
> of worms.

Yup. One single piece of advice: avoid micro-managing. You are dealing with very technical and quite savvy people, don't patronise them: they hate it.

Cheers
Nuno Souto
wizofoz2k_at_yahoo.com.au.nospam Received on Fri Sep 03 2004 - 03:46:52 CDT