Re: DBAs:Databases 1:10 (Oracle) 1:31 (SQL Server)

What Oracle calls a database is different from what SQLserver calls a database. SQLserver databases are equivalent to Oracle schema's.

>>> "Niall Litchfield" <niall.litchfield_at_gmail.com> 06/13/06 8:02 AM
>>>

Hi  

I also couldn't be bothered ^H^H^H^H^H find time to read the paper in full, but have an opinion anyway :) .  

First this isn't a measure of how many databases a DBA can support, but how many they do support. Related to that is my view that DBAs don't in fact support databases at all. We support applications (either in whole or in part). The measures that you have suggest - but don't conclusively show - that the applications running on Oracle databases tend to be larger and quite possibly more complex than those on Microsoft. This probably goes a long way to explaining why more resource gets dedicated to the Oracle based things.  

Second this sort of analysis will suffer from the ratio analysis problem that a) the measure maybe meaningless anyway and b) 10 dbas managing 100 databases is the same ratio as one managing 10 - telling me both the numbers tells me a lot about the two shops Ratios hide detail.  

On 6/13/06, Tony Jambu <tjambu_freelists_at_yahoo.com.au> wrote: Hi all

Recently, I came across an 'interesting' paper on the comparative difference of the total cost of database administration between Oracle and SQL Server. It was conducted by Alinean.

Some interesting findings:

Measure                                         Microsoft   Oracle
---------------------------------------         ---------  ------ 
Average number of databases per company         107         87
Average number of users per database            328         716
Mission critical databases                      66.1%       63.8%
Transaction-based databases                     55.7%       60.3%
Decision-support databases                      44.3%       39.7%
*** Databases supported per DBA                 31.2        9.9
Users supported per DBA                         6,784       5,567 
Annual TCA per database                         $2,847      $10,206
Annual TCA per database user                    $13.09      $18.15

If you cant read the above, make sure you have it as fixed font or goto
http://www.alinean.com/PDFs/Alinean-MicrosoftAndOracleTCAStudy.pdf

I find it hard to believe that the average Oracle DBA can manage only 10 databases.
From memory, a past survey on best practices indicated that an Oracle DBA manages
on average about 30 Oracle databases.

I guess for my own interest and possibly all those interested too, we could work out what our ratio of DBAs:Databases. If you are so kind

as to reply to the following questions.

Q1.  How many DBAs are in your company
Q2.  How many Production Databases (Oracle + others) do they manage
Q2.  How many Test/Dev Databases (Oracle + others) do they manage 

If you do not wish to publish the figures directly to this list, just send me an email and I will collate it after a week.

tony

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-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info 

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