Re: Can DBA Jobs be Outsourced ???

comments embedded

"Tanel Poder" <tanel@@peldik.com> wrote in message news:3f3178a5$1_1_at_news.estpak.ee...
> > > Can you explain why " the DBA has to be present at the location to do
> the
> > > maintenance work" ?
>
> To identify IO bottlenecks by looking at disk drive LEDs in server room ;)
>
> But seriously - you can't do software development completely overseas -
you
> have to have at least analysts, who are facing the customers and doing
> interviews. Yeah, sure you can do those over phone or e-mail as well, but
> you'll spend 10 times more time on it that way & lose in quality of
> analysis. A simple programmer on the other hand, will get the
specification
> and return code according to this spec. This can be done anywhere.

This is the big problem. (one the bean counters cannot understand) Often in software development the specification et al is not complete or it assumes a certain level of "domain knowldege". In these code shops they do not (usually) have domain knowledge and thus they "code to the specification". The result is that they often have to do it multiple times because the spec writer assumes a level of domain knowledge that does not exist. (given the time cost and the multiple redo costs I don't think it is cheaper, but often it is just the annual salary that gets looked at and not the total productivity.) Had a friend that did this type of thing for 5 years long before it was fashionable to do so. He spent huge amounts of time writing specifications that had to contain basic domain knowledge. The result was the process was a lot slower and more expensive. Jim

>
> I think that DBA's are somewhere between the analysts and simple
programmers
> in that sense. Disaster recovery for example shouldn't require a DBA to be
> on-site (ideally, it shouldn't require DBA anyway, an operator or sysadmin
> should be enough, because complete, detailed and tested recovery plans
> should exist in mission-critical environments anyway). Also simple tasks
> like monitoring, user/database/tablespace/whatever creation can easily be
> done off-site.
> But when you're planning for building and migration to your
next-generation
> Enterprise infrastructure, then again, you have to get and syncronize
> information with a lot of different people, thus you got to be onsite.
>
> So, everything is possible to do offsite, thanks to phones and internet,
but
> you just won't be efficient that way.
>
> Tanel.
>
>
Received on Mon Aug 11 2003 - 22:26:40 CDT