Re: Are Oracle GUIs causing a decline in DBA salaries?

From: Tim X <timx_at_spamto.devnul.com>
Date: 27 Apr 2003 18:54:09 +1000
Message-ID: <87d6j8e2xa.fsf@tiger.rapttech.com.au>

>>>>> "Karsten" == Karsten Farrell <kfarrell_at_belgariad.com> writes:

 Karsten> pharfromhome_at_hotmail.com said...
>> Has anyone noticed that the Oracle GUI tools and wizards are
>> making it far too easy to be an Oracle DBA?
>>
>> Just for fun, I asked my 9-year-old daughter to install Oracle9i
>> on a PC, and she was successful without a word of assistance from
>> me. (BTW, she though it was "real boring")
>>
>> Anyhow, I hear that the next OEM is going to be so easy that even
>> an MSCE will be able to do Oracle DBA work, and I'm worried.
>>
>> How will us Oracle DBAs be able to justify our salaries once
>> Oracle becomes as easy to use as MS-Access?
>>

 Karsten> It's a good thing you had her do it on Windows instead of
 Karsten> Linux or Unix!  It's a good thing you didn't ask her to
 Karsten> install Oracle9iDS.

 Karsten> Installing is the "easy" part ... but you do have a

 Karsten> point. Personally, I'm glad Oracle makes the "drudge" jobs a  Karsten> bit easier. I like OEM.

 Karsten> I'm more concerned about Open Source databases stealing away
 Karsten> a big chunk of Oracle's customers, leaving a lot of Oracle
 Karsten> DBAs pounding the pavement, looking for a job. How many
 Karsten> companies will look at the price of Oracle versus MySQL and
 Karsten> ask "Do we *really* need all that power?"

 Karsten> MS Access will rule the low-end and Oracle/SQLServer will
 Karsten> rule the high- end and MySQL will yank away the middle

 Karsten> layer. Uh-huh. And pigs will fly. -- /Karsten DBA > retired  Karsten> > DBA

While it might be easier to install Oracle, I don't think that is really the main skill of a DBA - the real DBA skills come in the maintenance of the system, not the initial installation. While I'm actually not a fan of GUIs, I guess they can help take some of the drudgery out of some tasks, but apart from the trivial stuff, you still need an understanding of what is going on if you are really going to be effective.

Personally, I think the bigger threat to DBAs is the growing number of managers who are primarily bean counters and have little to no technical knowledge or understanding. These managers seem to swallow the sales pitches of people like hardware vendors. Instead of the manager talking to their DBAs about how they can improve performance etc, they seem to bypass them completely and go straight to the hardware sales consultant and ask them what to do - the usual answer is buy more disk/memory/cpus etc, when often the DBA would have been able to come up with suggestions which require less hardware outlay etc.

I've been quite amazed at how many MySQL databases are out there - while they are a reasonable basic sql database, they are really not much more useful than MS access in many respects - last time I looked, you could only perform a subset of sql queries - limited nested queries, limited in-line views, limitations on the combinations of fields and how they are used (e.g. order/group by only allowed on columsn which are selected in the outer select clause etc). There was only very limited support for stored procedures and I don't think there was support for triggers, check constraints or foreign keys. A lot of this may have changed, but I suspect MySQL is still very light weight.

I think a database which will become more prevalent is Postgres - while slower than MySQL, it has a much richer set of features and comes a lot closer to the feature set offered by Oracle.

There has certainly been a decline in the number of pure DBA positions and this is likely to continue. However, I don't think we will see a day where there is not some form of DBA role - it is possible the distinction between system administrator and DBA will become more blurred - or possibly DBA and developer will be less distinct. Personally, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing - I've often seen difficulties and disagreements which a primarily due to sys admins and dbas not communicating properly because they both understand the system at different levels and it can be difficult to find a common channel of communication. Greater understanding of the requirements and limitations at both levels can only help in the problem solving process.

Tim

-- 
Tim Cross
The e-mail address on this message is FALSE (obviously!). My real e-mail is
to a company in Australia called rapttech and my login is tcross - if you 
really need to send mail, you should be able to work it out!

Received on Sun Apr 27 2003 - 03:54:09 CDT