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

I just loved Dennis' "artistic soul"! This is, I believe, precisely the heart of the problem. Many DBAs are fairly creative types (sometimes under constraint) but the name "administrator" doesn't exactly reflect this and rather conveys a 5-year-plan, soviet style vision of production. For developers, they are often nothing more than the folks who provide them with a fresh copy of the production database. I know a place where there is a development DBA and a production DBA sharing the same office (both fairly interchangeable, by the way), and another one where DBAs belong to the infrastructure team, but where a few "transverse" folks, tagged "DB specialists" more than "DBAs" try to get a foot early enough in the various projects, with the help of "production DBAs" who market them. I like this model fairly well. As Dennis points out, the existence of canned applications means that the infrastructure team *needs* DBAs. Moreover, being with the system/network/storage guys allows DBAs to facilitate problem solving. As we all know, users call DBAs whatever goes wrong because 'the database isn't responding'. DBAs often act as dispatchers.

My 0.02 euros

Stéphane Faroult

Dennis Williams wrote:

> Sam,
>
> I think both Stephen and Lee have good points. I would tend to agree
> that putting the DBA in the development group can produce better
> coordination with the developers. Gives the DBA better opportunity to
> attend early design meetings.
> On the other hand, the trend is moving toward companies purchasing
> most of their software, rather than "rolling their own". In that case,
> the focus becomes developing a competent infrastructure group with
> strong standards (development, test, and production environments) and
> consistent enforcement of these standards. I would argue that in this
> environment focused on infrastructure, putting the DBA in the
> infrastructure group might make more sense.
> Then again, the DBA is an artistic soul not easily bound by
> organizational confines.
>
> Dennis Williams

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