RE: Where should DBA's be placed in an Organization

I think most people are missing the point.  

Where should they be placed in the organization?  

Easy..............on a pedestal.  

Brian  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Daniel Fink Sent: Monday, April 24, 2006 10:08 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: RE: Where should DBA's be placed in an Organization  

In most organizations I have worked with, there are 2 types of DBA, Development and Operations. In some organizations, they are combined.

Development - part of the development/project team. Supports development/test systems. More focused on design and coding. If you don't do in house development, this role may be more of Application support (installing/testing new code from vendor with some test system support)

Operations - part of the infrastructure/operations team. Supports production/pseudo-production (staging/qa) systems. More focused on backup/recovery, tuning.

To be successful, you need to have both types overlap. Dev DBAs are valuable in production support to understand how the users/application are interacting with the database system; Ops DBAs have the experience that provides valuable input in the architecture phase of a system.

Of course, it is really not a technical issue, it is one of organizational politics. It is not unusual to see Development and Operations groups that don't "get along".

Daniel Fink

        Very non technical question, but I would appreciate people's views on where the DBA function should reside. In our organization we have Infrastructure support and Applications. I personally want to be with Applications as I feel we have much more to contribute, and if locked away in infrastructure we dont get to know about projects until they have been completed. We have a lot of input in Applications from evaluations of solutions, integration to working with developers. We should also be at the forefront with issues such as Datawarehousing/mining etc.. I would appreciate your views and help me make a case to present to my management. By the way we are in Infrastructure at the moment. The DBA role is changing and we need to be more proactive,

        thanks          

        sam  

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