Re: DBA and certification questions?

In article <14794d2a.7beed976_at_usw-ex0102-015.remarq.com>,   gdas <gdas1NOgdSPAM_at_yahoo.com.invalid> wrote:
> This question is to all the oracle experts out there: If you
> had to hire an Oracle DBA, what would you be looking for?
>
> I've been playing the role of a DBA at my current company. I
> have worked with oracle for almost 10 years, however from the
> vantage point of an application developer, so my areas of
> competence are in things like datamodeling, pl/sql, oci etc...
>
> Right now, I've been doing both jobs, but I have no experience
> in all the back end things that most dba's should have
> competencies in like storage and index management, backup,
> replication, tuning, etc, etc...
>
> We're on the verge of getting budget approval to bring in real
> DBA and I'll be responsible for hiring this person.
>
> My first priority is look for experience first, regardless of
> certification... Should my next criteria be certification? Is
> certification that important?
>
> Also, (I know nothing about the certification process), when you
> get certified, are you certified for a specific version of
> Oracle on a specific Platform?? I would think that someone who
> was certified and only worked with Oracle 7.3 on NT may not be
> ideally suited to working with Oracle 8.1 on Solaris etc...am I
> right?
>
> Also is certification just one "catch-all" acomplishment? In
> other words, can your certification be focused in a particular
> area (like OLTP, or datawarehousing etc...???)
>
> If there are any pointers that anyone wishes to share (things to
> look for, questions to ask), I'd be much obliged.
>
> Is it common to have someone take an oracle test during an
> interview? I'm considering pulling out specific questions from
> the DBA study book and having the applicant complete this test.
> Does anyone have any good scenario questions I might want to
> focus on?
>
> Our business is web based (when we go live...probably 6 months
> down the road) and is going to run with an oracle backend
> database server...so this is a very critical hire.
>
> Thanks,
> Gavin
>
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There are different types of DBAs. Some support developers and some don't. Some work with custom-developed systems, some work with ERP. Different skill sets - though there is some overlap - may be required in different areas. For example, PeopleSoft (either HRMS or Financials) does not use many (some would say none) of the features that differentiate Oracle from any other RDBMS. So an intimate knowledge of declarative integrity constraints is probably not necessary. If you work with custom-developed apps that use such features or that use a lot of packages, stored procedures, etc., then such knowledge and a good working knowledge of PL/SQL would have more weight. If the DBA is required to develop back-end PL/SQL e.g. triggers, stored procedures and the like, then more knowledge of PL/SQL and actual hands-on experience doing such development owuld be required. Again, if you're using partitioning, some experience would be desirable. If you are using advanced replication/distiributed database, clearly knowledge of advanced replication features, db links, etc and hands-on experience with these would be required. One could go on. You might check out the Revealnet website for materials written by Mike Ault on hiring DBAs. Food for thought.

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Before you buy. Received on Thu Jul 20 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT