Developer or DBA

Two posts had me thinking last week.

The first was Howard's mention that his employer in Sydney is looking for a ground-to-middling level DBA. The second was the Alchemist's posting on the DBA / Developer divide.

I'm a developer. I coded Pro*Cobol (when dinosaurs ruled the Earth), wrote Pro*C, developed with Oracle Forms and Reports, threw together some Perl and created buckets of PL/SQL. I've also built a reasonably good understanding of Oracle. I know what segments, extents and tablespaces are about, why we have undo and redo, and even the difference between a database and instance. I've got a shelf full of Tom Kyte books (okay, three of them, but also Jonathan Lewis and Connor McDonald and a couple of others so it is a heavy bookshelf). I have, in extremis, altered datafile and tablespace settings (but only in development environments).

In keeping with the great divide, I'll admit to not knowing an awful lot about what DBAs do all day. As one of the comments to the 'great divide' says, management seem intent on keeping developers and DBAs apart. At one place I worked, the DBAs were on a different continent with about six hours time difference.

I know their responsibilities include ensuring backups are being done in a way that they can actually be used, and that sometimes they'll copy databases, create users, run scripts to create the tables and objects that us mere developers have asked for. They are the gatekeepers to the great and secret passwords. They patch and monitor. And if there is a high database to DBA ratio, this alone can keep them very busy. But I have the feeling that a lot of DBAs do a lot of other things too. I just don't know what and I suspect the scope of DBAing varies a lot between employers.

I've assumed that DBAs know what developers do. There's a lot of time spent in specifications and requirements, trying to 'phrase' the business requirements in a manner that means they can actually be coded. More time is spent writing SQL, PL/SQL and maybe some other languages or in an interface development environment. Then there's getting the code to run properly with some testing. Finally, we wrap it all up in some sort of parcel and throw it at the DBAs and say "put this into test or production or wherever".

I've never used RMAN, OEM or Statspack, patched an Oracle installation, wouldn't even begin to recover a crashed database and I was totally lost with Howard's recent post on fracturing LUNs (which is something to do with disks, apparently). All of which means I'd learn an awful lot as a ground level DBA. I think I'd enjoy learning how to be a DBA.

I'm just not sure whether I'd enjoy BEING a DBA. The word 'administrator' isn't inspiring, the ringing of the phone at odd hours is unappealling, and the thought of someone standing over me saying, "Oh, and if we can't get this data back, we're all out of a job" is frankly scary.

I think I'll stick to development...but I did have to have a think about it.