Re: Becoming ORACLE DBA

From: DA Morgan <damorgan_at_psoug.org>
Date: Sun, 03 Jul 2005 10:44:36 -0700
Message-ID: <1120412690.109371@yasure>

Mark A wrote:
> "DA Morgan" <damorgan_at_psoug.org> wrote in message
> news:1120335884.72500_at_yasure...
>

>>Mark A wrote:
>>
>>
>>>It didn't take me 3 years working as a UNIX admin to figure out top, sar, 
>>>iostat, vmstat, etc. But as stated in other posts, I usually work at 
>>>places that have a separate UNIX admin staff for the heavy UNIX lifting.
>>
>>Or RAW or logical volume managers or ethernet bonding or ....
>>
>>
>>>BTW, I find those UNIX tools almost useless for serious database tuning 
>>>since most database I/O is asynchronous (in a well-tuned system).
>>
>>Given that you have never tuned a TB+ Oracle database I'm not surprised.
>>Given that you've never worked with RAC I'm not surprised.
>>Given that you've never worked with ASM I'm not surprised.
>>Given that you've never worked with Grid Control I'm not surprised.
>>
>>Your experience is NOT my experience nor that of the DBAs and SAs I
>>have worked with for more than a decade.
>>-- 
>>Daniel A. Morgan

>
>
> You don't know what experience I have as a DBA. Nevertheless, based on the
> comments from others in this thread, they consensus seems to be:
>
> 1. Many database designs are very poor from a performance, data integrity,
> and even functional standpoint.
>
> 2. The DBA's are the ones with DDL create authority and DBA's almost always
> get the blame if the design or performance is bad.
>
> 3. It is much harder to find someone with good database design skills (and
> harder to teach), than it is for someone to learn the UNIX technical skills
> necessary.
>
> Granted there are situations when a technical expert in RAC, streaming, etc
> is needed. That is often why consultants are hired. Even if these skills are
> available in house, it not necessary that every DBA be an expert in those
> skill sets. But I never denied that one needs to be very technical
> concerning Oracle issues. I said that one does not need to have 3 years UNIX
> admin experience to be good DBA.

 From my experience, in the vast majority of workplaces DBAs are segregated from developers in a separate organization with separate management and the two rarely interract except when an application is being promoted from dev to test or test to prod.

And in many situations the Oracle DBA is dealing with COTS (Commerical Off The Shelf) applications such as SAP, Siebel, Baan, Banner, etc. and has no say so as to any aspect of the design. The DBAs job is just to make a poorly designed pile of garbage run as efficiently as possible.

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)

Received on Sun Jul 03 2005 - 12:44:36 CDT