Re: Oracle 9i + Death of the DBA

On 9 Oct 2003 13:21:08 -0700, ed_zep_at_ntlworld.com (Ed) wrote:

>I was wondering what people think about 9i's new features that
>supposedly significantly decrease or at least alter the duties of the
>DBA.
>
>Is anyone re-thinking their future career path because of it?
>
>Will there be such a great need for DBAs in the future?
>
>Any sensible comments appreciated.
>
>Ed.

I recently attended a 9i upgrade course. The instructor stated that with the 9i features the *routine* work of the DBA, above all the space management part of it, would disappear. Personally I'm not sure whether the impact on my job will be big. First of all, my company is in outsourcing, and on all most all of the servers we are administrating the database is hosting a 'generic' application, usually written for sqlserver and 'ported' to Oracle. Consequently almost all of these applications don't use any Oracle 8i feature, they usually rely on the Rule Based Optimizer, if the developers at all know what an optimizer is and what it does. No one uses bind variables and everyone commits every individual record. Referential integrity is an unknown concept, and if there is RI it is not maintained in the database.
So my main task is resolving performance problems, because if anything does go wrong, invariably the database is blamed.

Many of these vendors don't support Oracle 9i. Usually this simply means they didn't certify their (cr)ap(p) against 9i and also usually it is very unclear when, if ever, a 9i version is going to arrive.

I'm almost certain the only reason to upgrade to 9i , in all of those applications, is to stay supported. Sometimes the customer *has* to upgrade because a hardware replacement comes with a newer version of the O/S against which the old version of Oracle wasn't certified.

That said, I foresee it will take 1 or 2 years from now, to convince all those customers they have to upgrade to Oracle 9i. If they upgrade they still don't *NEED* *ANY* of Larry's new features and likely they are going to *stick* to 9i, simply because the RBO is removed from 10g.

I also have the feeling that Larry invented just another marketing hype. Like Oracle 9i was shown to be breakable, I'm almost certain the DBA is not going to disappear, simply because many organisations rely on DBAs who didn't kept their knowledge up to date, so they won't even know how to use it.
The DBA is also not going to disappear because many of those new features are very easy to screw up a complete database, when they are applied in an uncontrolled fashion. Just one example: it is very easy to configure Reason Manager in such a fashion only SYS and SYSTEM users get all the CPU available.

The death of the programmer has been announced at least during the last 15 years of the previous century. Yet he didn't disappear. He is now labeled 'developer' the only difference being he often didn't receieve any tuition on a formal approach to programming. Consequently he only knows how to a hack, not how to program. This 'developer' is already causing nightmares in many organizations. If the last resource of technical Oracle knowledge, the DBA, disappears, I think disaster will soon strike in those orgs.

I also think Larry and Oracle are moving in a direction many smaller organizations don't need and don't want: they are basically satisfied with 7.3, they have been forced to upgrade to 8i, but they really don't need. Further 'improvements' of Oracle will only increase the reluctance to upgrade, as it will cost money to adapt everything to the newer version.

--
Sybrand Bakker, Senior Oracle DBA