Being a DBA

Being a DBA

Now that I have been a DBA myself and looking for a new opportunitues, I have some thoughts about
what makes a good DBA and a good DBA manager.

This is purely what I think and all suggestions are welcome.

You are accountable for company database, and that includes.

Database Availability
Backup/Recovery
Database Performance
Database Security
Database Maintainability
Database Scalability / Capacity planning.

And you can always add more………………

That said being a manager you have additional responsibilities.

1. Keeping everyone busy, each person in a team should always have all fingers dirty, means atleast 5 things to do at one time.
They can multitask and even do more than 5 easily and learn to priortize their work based on importance of work.

I have seen sometimes there is no work for days and this is really poor management.

2. Always have good communication and tools to support it too.

Like we have Lync in our office and we can chat and call anyone anytime.

3. Use yourself as the minimum acceptable standard for your team.
For example try to hire people better than you.

4. How to keep team current with technology changes.

Encourage the sharing of new knowledge, we can always train each other, send emails for anything new achieved
and taking it forward we can manage and keep an updated wiki page.

5. Always give feedback, everyone loves to get a pat on the back now and then and also taking little feedback yourself will always help.

6. Establish a productivity baseline, so that you will know when you make it better or worse.

At the end of the day Service is the king, keep the system running and available.

Will be updating this as I go along.

Vijay Tarun