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DBA Roles and "Duties"
A bit ago I asked (again) about what a DBA does, how you define the position and what constitutes a DBA vs. a database "person" vs. a database developer, etc. I’ve had an overwhelming response to this, and while there are some points shared by several people, what strikes me more is the vast diversity of the answers. Everyone, it seems (or at least an awful lot of us), has a different definition of what exactly a DBA is and does.
Here’s an example, from Michael: "A real DBA? There’s no such thing.
What we should be talking about are roles, not titles. To me there are three primary roles to discuss – Database Developer, Database Administrator and Database Architect.
Database Developer – Primary responsibilities are involved with new or maintenance based development. Stored Procedures, table builds, index builds, UDF coding, etc. are the main reaponsibilities of this role.
Database Administrator – Primary responsibilities are involved with the care, feeding and incremental improvement of databases. Backup implementation/verification, index rebuilds, defragmentation, troubleshooting, etc. are the main responsibilities of this role.
Database Architect – Primary responsibilities are involved with design and strategy to be implemented by the Database Administrator or the Database Developer. Relational and Dimensional modeling, Backup strategy, Stored Procedure design, Indexing strategy, etc. are the main responsibilities of this role.
This is obviously a highly condensed and therefore highly imperfect description, but the idea is conveyed. The problem is that few of us are allowed to fall cleanly into one of these neatly defined groups. We all have to do pieces of all these roles (and others). The level of your skills and experience helps decide how much of each you do. Any or all of these certainly qualify you as a Database Professional.
A real DBA? There’s no such thing."
And another from Jim: "This is a tough one since the scope of a DBA, which was never really consistent, and has grown dramatically.
I have been a DBA for the last 22 years. I started out with large-scale IBM hierarchical databases (called IMS) and am doing a range of IBM mainframe DB2 to Unix and SQL Server DBMS duties. But as any knows, you don’t turn a junior DBA loose on mission-critical production systems — no matter how intelligent that junior DBA is. But when I started, I saw DBAs as a career path for hot-shot programmers who didn’t want to become business system analysts. But even then the senior DBA position evolved so that it could vary from internal management consultants, to technically savvy gurus who could design databases and recover production databases under stressful conditions.
As the world evolved into relational DBMSes, the scope broadened. Performance tuning was more complicated. Then came Business Intelligence and it required even a different set of disciplines for the database design. In bigger companies we now have strategic DBAs who plan the IT strategy for the business, auditor DBAs who ensure there are checks and balances (thanks to Sarbaines-Oxley legislation in the US), stored procedure writing DBAs, installation DBAs who will receive and install the code from the DBMS vendor, outsourced/lower cost DBAs retained in other countries to handle the more repetitive duties, and DBAs who oversee these outsourced relationships.
Is there a DBA who can do all the functions? I hardly think so — at least not very well across multiple DBMS platforms. But each is doing DBA type work. I guess I would have to draw the line on what you would define as a database.
Certainly a Foxpro or Access database expert would not be a DBA. If it is a multi-user, multi-tasking, mission critical database system, the person who has some form of responsibility for it is a DBA."
…and frankly, I think it’s a matter of still being in-flux as responsibilities morph and companies shift people and duties around in the changing marketplace for IT folks
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