Re: How much DBA stuff should a developer learn?

Ryan,

If you want to become a "good" prgrammer you will have to know more about the DBA side of Oracle. A lot of what the DBA job entails is knowing how Oracle works internally and tries to interpret the statements a programmer provides.

You can create reasonably nice stuff without knowing these thing but only to a certain level. If you ever have to create really complex programs you will hit Database issues such a locking problems. The next big issue you will hit is perfomance. This will ALLWAYS crop up if you try to make software for production situations that will grow rapidly. The code will look nice with 10K records but when it hits 10M your customer will start to complain.

Understanding the inherent problems with your programs is delving into the internal of Oracle. A DBA is nothing more than a guy (or girl) who does this and is by nature mostly very very cautious.

A big part of everything is experience. It works that way for DBAs as well as for programmer. Just ask you DBA to look at your code once in a while or discuss who Oracle would interpret this. This is mostly very worthwhile.

I which you luck on your journey, it will be an interesting one. An good luck with your Masters, having a degree never hurts.

Ron
"Ryan Gaffuri" <rkg100_at_erols.com> wrote in message news:a5umd1$pj2$1_at_bob.news.rcn.net...
> I have been a developer for about 18 months now and Ive started delving
into
> the DBA side of Oracle. I have read the concepts manual and am now reading
> the manual on performance tuning. Ill have to read both of those atleast
> twice to really pick up all the information. Im slowly reading Tom Kyte's
> book as well. Its slow going since most of it is new information.
>
> Ive noticed that many "senior" developers do not bother to learn this side
> of it. What Im learning now is really opening my eyes to alot of things
that
> I just took for granted. I open a cursor, ok it does what I want. Its
pretty
> useful to know what is going on and how its being processed.
>
> I dont think I want to become a DBA. Ill probably head down the data
> modelling/business rules route in time, however, I think that in order to
be
> an elite professional in Oracle I should learn more about the database
side.
>
> Howard Rogers recommended Practical 8i. Does anyone have any other
> recommendations on specifics of what I should learn?
>
> Also, Im leaning towards getting a Masters in Software Engineering at
George
> Mason... how useful is a Masters in this business? I dont have a CS degree
> and I have found that that limits my options.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ryan Gaffuri
>
>
Received on Sun Mar 10 2002 - 08:41:32 CST