Re: Becoming ORACLE DBA

On Sat, 02 Jul 2005 16:26:55 -0700, hpuxrac interested us by writing:

> Many professionals take the challenge seriously and get involved early
> enough to avoid these type of design problems.

While I agree with this statement, I also submit that the ratio of professionals to amateurs, at least in areas I see, is becoming vanishingly small.

Too often do I get asked to "provide a quick fix" for "a small performance problem - we developed this in 'xyz' against database 'zyx' and can't get it working in Oracle. Our DBA doesn't know what to tune and our developers come from 'xx eXcess' and don't have experience in complicated stuff like Oracle. (By the way, our budget for the performance effort is $37.76!)"

I encourage anyone, especially OP, to become a professional DBA. Just as long as potential DBAs to realize that

1. Managing the database is only a part of the entire DBA role;
2. Managing users, developers and managers is a significant chore;
3. If anything goes wrong, be it hardware, network OS or DB, the DBA will be the first to be blamed;
4. All applcations are only as good as their data - any data issues are the DBAs fault;
5. all users have a potential 'Brittany Spears' inside and will come to the DBA singing 'Oops, I did it again. Could you restore ..."

I encourage OP to read chapter 1 of the Database Administration Guide where the various roles are described. After reading that, and realizing that a DBA needs to be aware of (and generaly competent in) all the roles, the OP should ask again whether he wants to become a DBA.

-- 
Hans Forbrich                           
Canada-wide Oracle training and consulting
mailto: Fuzzy.GreyBeard_at_gmail.com   
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