Which "flavor" DBA are you?

re: Which "flavor" DBA are you?

Denis Gobo — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 07:57:17 GMT

I am 25% 1 and 75% 3

Hybrid DBA/Developer?

re: Which "flavor" DBA are you?

Adam Machanic — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:13:38 GMT

I hope most database developers aren't really doing all of the stuff you say they are...

re: Which "flavor" DBA are you?

David R Buckingham — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:31:11 GMT

Too often we don't fall neatly within just one of the three different types you've defined. I would suspect that it depends heavily on the size of the company and/or team.

I grew into 1, transitioned into 2, and eventually became 3. Although now that I work for a small company, I am currently about 10% 1, 5% 2, and 85% 3.

And Adam, many have used a production database for confirmation that a performance tweak will behave exactly as expected when it is impossible to duplicate the database/hardware environment outside of production. Granted, I have not done that in a long time now, but I cannot state that I will not ever do it again.

re: Which "flavor" DBA are you?

Adam Machanic — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:53:18 GMT

Yes, we've all done it, but that certainly doesn't mean that we should! A long time ago I caused some production problems as a result of playing fast and loose with testing on live systems. The problems I caused were minor, but one time another DBA I was working with caused a short amount of downtime (due to a transaction that she forgot to roll back, that was sitting there blocking everything). It was embarrassing for the whole database team, and I really do not want to risk being put in that situation again!

re: Which "flavor" DBA are you?

Linchi Shea — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:10:07 GMT

I'm none of the above. it appears that I'm (1) 50% SQL Server infrastructure engineer evaluating, recommending, and designing SQL Server infrastructure components and systems, and (2) 50% 'behavioral empiricist'--if there is such a thing--studying the behavior of SQL Server as an empirical science.

re: Which "flavor" DBA are you?

James Luetkehoelter — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:23:28 GMT

I think I'd say I'm 1, 2, 3 and 4, 5, 6 - all that and a bit more, depending on the situation. Given the client and the situation (and if I have my way), I'll follow the data from initial conception and modeling, to implementation and optimization, as well as management, the later consumption (applications, reports, Biztalk, etc).

I generally define myself as a data-centric specializing generalist. I focus on SQL Server specifically, but I know a little about an awful lot (networking, AD, development, etc).

I think one of the biggest problems in our industry right now is that many organizations want to categorize job functions and "silo" them since there's way too much to learn unless you specialize. I think that's just plain silly. All job descriptions in IT/IS should overlap. A "production" DBA has to know a bit about hardware and the operating system. A networking infrastructure specialist needs to know a bit about how AD works, or how applications interact with each other over the network. The server infrastructure specialist has to know a bit about database systems and application development to understand how something new utilizes physical resources.

Of all the clients I work with, the most difficult projects are ones where "silo-ing" is prevalant. The ones that roll smoothly have people being experts in one area but at least conversant in others.

A Follow-up to Database Professionals: An Enterprise Requirement

Andy Leonard — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 01:14:52 GMT

Eric Wise drew some heat from the developer community at CodeBetter.com with this post about the need