RE: survey - DBA structure in your company ?

  • From: "Bobak, Mark" <Mark.Bobak@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "DEEDSD@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <DEEDSD@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 14:15:16 -0400

We do not distinguish between "system DBA" and "application DBA".  All DBAs 
handle all aspects of the job.  DBAs are assigned to certain areas of 
expertise, by application.  Each DBA has an area of expertise in a particular 
application, but there's plenty of overlap.  So, much of the day to day stuff 
for any application can be handled by any DBA.  If there's a specific problem, 
that may be related to data or application logic, the problem can be referred 
to the DBA that knows that particular application best.

I like it, because I don't get pigeonholed into only doing system DBA 
activities or only doing application DBA activities.

Just my two bits,

-Mark

From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of DEEDSD@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, April 02, 2009 1:52 PM
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: survey - DBA structure in your company ?


We are a reasonably large corporation, with 650 Oracle databases.  We are 
having a bit of internal discussion going on concerning different support 
models:

(1) Having separation of duties for DBAs: one DBA area in responsible for 
infrastructure across all databases and another group doing application DBA 
work across multiple application databases, closer to the applications and 
their data or
(2) Doing DBA work in silos: one DBA would be responsible for a certain set of 
applications and databases end-to-end, responsible for all infrastructure and 
application data work for that set of applications

We currently have a structure like this:

We have systems DBAs that are responsible for the database infrastructure - 
installing the server software & patching, tuning at the instance level, 
monitoring db server capacity, backup & recovery, adding sizing datafiles, 
disaster recovery, database creation, user & security administration, 24x7 
level 3 support.

We have application DBAs that are closer to the application data, and are 
responsible for creating and maintaining the application schema objects 
(tables, indexes, etc), some SQL statement tuning, logical backups (exp/imp) of 
application objects, data loads, 24x7 level 2 support.

I am curious what other folks are doing.

Other related posts: