RE: What are your DBA subclasses?

Having been through this several times at small-to-medium sized shops (5-10 
DBAs), my experience is that there are essentially two models:

Function-specific divisions: "production DBA", "development DBA", etc.
Project/product-specific divisions: "all-around DBA" assigned to different 
systems and following the system from inception to production.

The former is far more common.  In my opinion, the latter is usually better.  
In addition to developing better all-around DBAs, with the latter, the one(s) 
designing and building the system get to suffer (or benefit from) their own 
mistakes (or lack thereof).   There is far less motivation for a "throw it over 
the wall - on time - and 'fix it later - when we have time' approach.  [With 
rushed/half-baked design and implementation, there is never "more time to fix 
it later".  All that time and more is spent on the gerbil-wheel of just keeping 
the system alive.]  There is also the non-negligible advantage of having the 
production DBA being intimately familiar with the system.

Don Granaman | Phone: 402-361-3073 | Cell: 402-960-6955 | Fax: 402-361-3173 | 
Solutionary | Relevant . Intelligent . Security

From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Michael Moore
Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2011 1:12 PM
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: What are your DBA subclasses?

When we were a much smaller company, we had one class of DB, "generic-DBA" 
where DBA was an abbreviation for "Does 'Bout Anything". A given DBA was 
responsible for Installation, patching, configuration, disk management, PL/SQL 
code review, tuning SQL , application migration, development standards etc etc.

Now that we've grown into a billion dollar company with over a hundred 
developers, we probably need to have more specialization. I'm thinking in terms 
of DA, DCA, DBA ... you get the idea.

I'd be interested in how other medium sized organizations divide up their 
various DBA functions.

I'm sure this has been disguised before, so if you wan't to link me to reading 
material, that would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike

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