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Home -> Community -> Usenet -> c.d.o.server -> Re: Are Oracle DBAs trivialized?
Domenic wrote:
> I'd like everyone's thoughts on this ...
>
> More and more I am finding that the role of the Oracle DBA is not
> taken as seriously as it once was.
>
> Having worked for many software companies in the last few years I see
> the same pattern over and over -- most shops refuse to stay current
> with Oracle and patchsets -- they're still running 8i, don't want to
> use Oracle-specific features (clusters, IOTs, etc.) for fear it will
> lock them into Oracle, and let the developers model and write their
> own DDL.
>
> Most of the time I feel they only want a DBA to put out fires.
>
> Here are some recent examples ...
>
...
>
> This is not just my current company, but they all seem to be the same
> lately. It seems that the Java shops operate this way more than
> anyone else -- very hostile attitude towards Oracle and DBAs in
> general.
>
I think there is a general pattern of new computer science graduates not taking databases as seriously as they used to. DBAs are the anesthesiologists of the software industry - unfashionable, but try building a real system without them!
I have first hand experience of developers who regard the database as a 'storage device'. I had to spend *weeks* fighting with a developer on his second job out of college who's idea of using a database for on-line mortgage applications was to serialize his Java objects and store them in BLOB columns. Can you imagine what writing the reports would have been like?
Unlike COBOL, C or C++, modeling an entire application in a computer language as opposed to the database is not only possible but practical with Java, with the result being that the people who do the actual coding don't see the value in having business logic and rules at the database level. Current notions about multi-tier architectures also come into this, with some developers regarding things like foreign key constraints as 'business logic' that should be dealt with at the 'application server' layer.
When it comes to Java and Oracle the JDBC standard is also a factor. The capabilities of PL/SQL are so far ahead of what JDBC will easily support that it's very easy for a PL/SQL developer to write a procedure that can't be run from Java without the user of a pre-compiler, wrapper procedures or laboriously hand-coding anonymous blocks (this is the issue my employer addresses). If the DBA's keep producing procedures that the Java developers can't use without jumping through hoops a degree of frustration and even hostility is hardly surprising.
Oracle is also a victim of its own success when it comes to 8i. 8i is good. So good that there's no *compelling* incentive to upgrade to 9i or 10g. People in the Oracle community know that an upgrade will have to be done sooner or later and that the new versions are indeed better but in a lot of cases management will perceive it as more money to solve a non-existent problem.
My 10 cents..
David Rolfe
Orinda Software
Dublin, Ireland
www.orindasoft.com
Received on Tue Apr 12 2005 - 03:03:50 CDT
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