A question I often see posted in forums and that I occasionally get asked is 'what does it take to be a DBA?' A DBA is not a role that is achieved by attending a course or by earning a qualification. The knowledge that a DBA has is something that comes from many years of experience. I often describe a DBA as someone that is both an IT professional and a developer. I think that to be a DBA a person must not only understand how a DBMS works with hardware and the operating system but also how applications interact with the database system. A quality that I think is important in a DBA is one that many people would term conservatism. However, I would not term it conservatism but rather caution, as at the end of the day a DBA is charged with managing the data of an organisation. I would be interested to know what you think it takes to be a DBA. - Peter Ward
13 Years ago I started in Operations at a medium sized Insurance company. I worked my way up to developer, then database developer and finally DBA.I agree that the skills required for a DBA cannot easily be learned from a class or taught by a mentor. As a DBA I know that I am responsible for keeping the data online, correct and protected. But on any given day I could be working on a project that I didn't know existed until the last minute.There are many challenges with being a DBA and the developers often take the spotlight. The work is hard, but enjoyable for those who like to constantly learn new things.Michael HeindelOracle Certified DBASQL Server DBA
I agree Peter, especially with your opening comments. It seems to be a matter of picking up information from books, articles and the web. University subjects are either too general or too specialised. I would love to see a course on how to interpret SQL Server execution plans because anyone can knock together a DBMS based program, but creating one that scales by two or three orders of magnitude and still performs OK is really difficult.
