Q: How to structure a fast growing DBA group

Folks:

I have the awesome responsibility of setting up a database administration group for 3-4 critical production applications, each with 3 environments, PROD, QA and DEV. My group is responsible for all things Oracle including:

• New hardware evaluation/recommendation
• Hardware upgrades/maintenance
• UNIX system admin/security
• Physical DBA; sizing, backups, etc.
• Logical DBA; create tables, etc.
• Change management / migration
• Datamodeling
• Writing complex SQL & PL/SQL
• Data maintenance/manipulation
• Adhoc report generation

I am the lead DBA, and I have at least some experience with all of these areas. We are the Oracle experts at the company and right now, there are only 2 of us fulfilling all these roles for all projects. Our company is growing quickly and we are very overwhelmed with the amount of work we have.

My question is how do I staff this wide variety of skill sets?

• Do I find people that can handle it all end-to-end and assign one to each project?
• Do I find one person with each skill and have that person work on all projects?
• If so, should the hardware person(s) report to me or to the IS manager?
• Should the data/report person(s) report to me or to the development side?

These are tough questions. Please offer some insight into what has/hasn't worked for you.

Many thanks,
--David H. Received on Sat May 20 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT