Aspiring to become more than just an Oracle DBA 2.0
It saddens me in a way to read the widely talked article by 2 oracle certified masters, titled “Performing an Oracle DBA 1.0 to DBA 2.0 Upgrade”, a nicely written article encouraging DBAs out there to equip themselves better in order to be able to maintain the quality needed to work as a good Oracle DBA in a modern environment.
While it contains many good pointers about DBAs needing to expand their skillsets to include system and network administration, I think it lacks the ultimate need to encourage Oracle DBAs out there to step out of their comfort zone and do one thing that most DBAs do not do, i.e. trying to understand the business background which drives the need to build the application which uses the Oracle databases that we look after.
I have seen so many examples where DBAs would spend a lot of effort performing various tracing against a system to solve a performance problem. And spend further time analyzing the output to come up with an understanding of a system behavior.
The same answer could have been obtained by simply politely asking the users or the application teams about the nature of the application or the usage. I have time and time again found that these information is more valuable and accurate compared to my trendy detective work using highly technical tracing.
The other thing is the contentment of many DBAs to simply be tasked to ensure the running of an Oracle database. While I am not disputing that this is a mighty important task, sometimes it puzzles me how an Oracle DBA can have so little interest in understanding why a particular that they look after is deemed so important to the business, why it needs to be up 24/7, why an mere extra 20 min in batch processing time causing that particular user in NY to call us in frustration.
Humanizing DBA role will also help a DBA gain respect their users/developers better and vice versa.
And from my personal view, it’s much more interesting to expand my view this way, rather than filling up my brain with more new oracle tips and tricks, fancy tracing commands, setting events, setting hidden parameters, basically all the things that Oracle DBAs have been forced to learn by Oracle, because they can’t make their product work as it should in the first place?