What is a DBA?

Eleven years!

That’s how long I’ve been in my current job. It’s also probably the last time I tried to define the role of the DBA – in preparation for the interview in 1999. Now I’ve been tasked with writing a paper to define the role of the DBA and how in this globalised world we can best structure things to the maximum benefit of the company.

Now I’m convinced that the senior management believes that the DBA occupies an infrastructure role.  But hang on! My induction into IT was via application development, so I’m one of those that believes DBAing occupies one of the rare grey areas in IT. It’s neither one thing nor the other and personally I’m more than happy to float around in this nebula that lies between the operating system and the application layers.

The only thing I can be sure of is that the discipline gets bigger and harder as time passes and in addition to being the expert on the RDBMS one has been brought up on, there is now an increasing expectation that you should have more than a casual acquaintance with one or more of the others. That is: you’re not the Oracle DBA; you’re not the SQL Server DBA; you’re not the Blah DBA.

No. You’re none of these. You’re The DBA!

So what is a DBA?

Well eleven years ago, I’d have said it was somebody who was highly skilled in the tasks of maintaining an enterprise scale database; its backup and recovery; a mentor to developers who interacted with databases; and partial system administrator.

My opinion has changed. There is just far too much to know now. So what is a DBA? What am I?

Well I think I have become: an attitude; a state of mind; a set of behaviours; a learner; an educator; an enabler; a gatekeeper; a listener; a communicator; fascinated by business, people and technology; totally trustworthy; an optimist; a pragmatist;  instead of knowing what, I strive to know about; and above all, a problem solver.

I just happen to apply these characteristics to an ongoing interest in technology, data and information.

So how to express this and the value of my wonderful team in a paper? God knows!

It would be silly in this globalised era not to take advantage of the opportunities to offload the repetitive routine tasks, but how then to express the value of what my rather talented, imaginative and creative colleagues intangibly provide? We learn to the benefit the department and company. “Yes but what do you actually do?”. If you don’t produce a tangible deliverable, then a manager cannot measure what you do! So how do you resolve that?

I’ll let you know when I’ve worked it out!

Johnji