Re: Multiple DBs - Balancing Act

(trying again with "bad" word modified <grin>)

Mike,

We rated our databases based on factors such as vocal customers, database size (larger database might require special handling), development stage (new, rapidly developed apps tend to cause more work) and daily troubleshooting (anything with a pipeline or materialized views requires more hand-holding, etc) and tried to balance things based on these. This balance also included our model of having a Primary database owner (dbo) and a Secondary dbo. For the most part, being secondary means that if the primary is o.u.t. o.f. t.h.e. o.f.f.i.c.e, you need to pay attention to pages or emails about those databases as well as your primary ones.

Is it a fair balance? To some degree probably, but efforts to standardize, so that the on-call person can "plug-in" to any database and not spend a lot of time "learning" another database have been mixed.  Some things are under pretty tight control like our Listener Change Control group and is very stable, Redo logs (number of members and groups) have been debated (do you need to mirror with Oracle if you are mirroring with the hardware?) and no consensus has been reached and so we need to do a bit more investigation in some areas when we need to cover for someone.

I say give the new guy everything that the others don't want to do <grin>.

Stephen

>>> mvergara_at_guidant.com 08/11/03 02:39PM >>>
This question is for folks who are part of a team that manages multiple databases and multiple platforms.

How do you balance the load among your team? We're struggling with this concept right now as we're about to add another DBA to the group. We've considered such things as quantity (how many DBs does each DBA handle), importance (to the company - each DBA has 'n' databases, load (this DB is used 'n' times as much as another one, experience (of the DBA...do we put a UNIX-familiar person in charge of DBs on Windows?) and on and on. But then we stumble on quantifying the terms - importance, load, etc. And we have had some DBs that we considered 'small' become a major PITA when we weren't looking! We just signed a deal making Oracle our DB of choice for the next several years, so we could see an explosion of stuff.

So I'm asking...how do you do it?

Thanks,
Mike

---
===========================================================================
Michael P. Vergara
Oracle DBA
Guidant Corporation

-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net 
-- 
Author: Vergara, Michael (TEM)
  INET: mvergara_at_guidant.com 

Fat City Network Services    -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com 
San Diego, California        -- Mailing list and web hosting services
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in
the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L
(or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from).  You may
also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).


-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
-- 
Author: Stephen Andert
  INET: stephenandert_at_firsthealth.com

Fat City Network Services    -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com
San Diego, California        -- Mailing list and web hosting services
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in
the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L
(or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from).  You may
also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).