My last employer classified me as their 'Oracle Guy'. I did soup-to-nuts Oracle development
work. You name the Oracle product, VMS utility, 3GL language, I had my gritty hands into it.
As a consequence of having managed development projects, I acquired many DBA skills as well.
But one thing you won't find are people going beyond the call of duty.
On average, an individual will look up or reference only what is necessary to fullfill the
objectives of an assignment. My objectives were different as I wanted to be a DBA. I
understood that begin a DBA is not a level above programming, but rather a type of work which
ran parallel to programming just as I would consider System's administrators to be a type of
programmer. While the programmers' clay may be the 'C' language, a system's guy language being
Solaris, my expertise now lies with understanding the Oracle RDBMS.
My sole responsibility is to administrate a 500Gb world-wide implementation of Oracle. This
responsibility goes well beyond creating objects, datafiles, or jumping on the
fragmentation-panic bandwagon. The challenges of my job keep me busy 60+ hours a week. And
when another IS professional whines about alledged disparities in pay, I remind the individual
that I am the person who is taken from his family in the middle of the morning, day, or evening
when a F*^*&ing device failure occurs. Incidentally, I have well over 300 of these buggers and
believe it or not, they do fail.
Lastly, I don't know the nature of your shop, but I will say that I work with some of the most
skilled applications developers and programmers in the commercial industry. I also recognize
that I would not have the challenges before me today without having the talent around me.
These individuals recognize my contribution as quite valuable and I intend on remaining
valuable by sharing what I do know with those who do not and proving the pessimists wrong.
Your tone seems indicative of a person who does no coexist with such talent and this would be
my only critical remark of you as a professional in that the DBA's or programmers should have
enough time on their hands where they sit around, comparing pay stubs, comparing
responsibilities and then make the crucial mistake of applying the shortcomings of their shop
to the industry as a whole. Not a good thing.
-D
Received on Wed Aug 16 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST
