Re: what sort of dba can you get for 100K nowdays

>and none of them did.

Yup. I myself have gone fairly backwards in my transition into the DBA realm - I had been an infrastructure/network guy for years, and made the switch to DBA cold. Went into the environment, and got busy learning SQL DDL. I knew nothing about anything - tablespace? Not a clue. Segment? Never heard of it. Basically, I was 'home-grown' in an operational environment. And, I have learned. Over the past year and a half, I feel I've gotten pretty reasonable at what I'm doing - and yet I am not as familiar with the lower-level configuration principles as I _should_ be - simply because I have not done it as many times as some have, and because the time I have for academia is pretty lean.

I think that while spending time in mainly development environments would benefit a DBA by forcing them to understand block sizes and file system options like the back of their hand, there is a cost - development environments don't see the same kind of _problems_ as operational environments will see. In my case, I have been pretty light on much of the low-level config stuff, but I have seen my share of fires pop up - I recently had a situation where a developer using a read-only account caused the entire Production SGA to clog up with PL-SQL that had been generated by TOAD after running an Explain Plan on a crap SQL statement. The entire Prod database dropped after an ORA-600 was thrown. Thankfully, it was at 4pm on a Friday. As a result, I am teaching myself about standby databases for reporting.

As a potential employer, I am curious - if you had to choose, which would you value more? Someone who knew the theory of planning and deploying the physical and logical database inside and out, or someone who had seen enough problems to be able to handle himself intelligently, and with a cool head, when something goes sideways in Prod and he's suddenly put on the spot?

BD Received on Thu Apr 27 2006 - 18:00:07 CDT