Re: Oracle DBA Job or Oracle Apps Support?

Hi,

As far as I'm concerned my real interests are in development in distributed applications. Any business application of any value has to have persistent data - hence every developer has to have good knowledge of a database. I only started doing DBAing from small development servers but now do far more DBAing.

I think being a DBA is the most structured career path available to anyone in IT. The role always, at least on Oracle, just seems to evolve - there's never a wham bam switch to a completely different language change.

I work for an IT consultancy company and DBAs (those with other 5 years experience) are always in more demand, paid more, looked after better than developers. I personally think that a good developer is more valuable (one who can do design and has some DBA knowledge) since they can tackle anything.

So go for development but keep your hand in DBAing when you get a change on development severs. There will always be a need for DBAs on server farms / large set-ups as a role between sysadmin and development. But remember, a good DBA's ambition is to eliminate themselves from the proceedings where ever possible.

If you do stick to DBAing you must learn PL/SQL well and ideally another language like C or C++ (or Java) to be a useful DBA.

Oh, application support, this is truly awful unless the application is using a language that you don't know and want to get in to. If it's an Oracle application your decision is easy - don't go near it - they are all awful - and you won't advance your career learning it.

Regards,
Daniel. Received on Sat Sep 20 2003 - 11:36:49 CDT