But this is not a complete description of her duties. Metadata, or data about data, also must be maintained. Without metadata, the data stored in databases lacks true meaning. Once again, if your company has a data administration group then this task will be handled by that group. Of course, that does not mean the DBA can ignore meta data management.
A DBA must be able to translate a data model or logical database design into an actual physical database implementation and to manage that database once it has been implemented. The physical database may not conform to the logical model percent due to physical DBMS features, implementation factors, or performance requirements.
The DBA must understand all of the physical nuances of each DBMS used by his organization in order to create efficient physical databases. Because data consumption and usage continues to grow, the DBA must be prepared to support more data, more users, and more connections. The ability to predict growth based on application and data usage patterns, and to implement the necessary database changes to accommodate that growth, is a core capability of the DBA.
Although the DBA typically is not coding new application programs, she does need to know how to write effective programs. Dealing with performance problems is usually the biggest post-implementation nightmare faced by DBAs.
As such, the DBA must be able to proactively monitor the database environment and to make changes to data structures, SQL, application logic and the DBMS subsystem itself in order to optimize performance. More and more, applications and data are required to be up and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Globalization and e-business are driving many organizations to implement no-downtime, around-the-clock systems. This is a partial list of the items that came to my mind right away.
No, not every DBA will be doing all these tasks but chances are they will do one or more:. This is the number one task for any DBA. Backups — Having backups makes your ability to recover a bit easier. DBAs get paid for performance but we keep our jobs with recovery. Risk — Assessing risk, working with auditors, outlining security and access control.
Installation — Installing database software on servers. Configuration — Configuration of database servers. Monitoring — Monitoring database servers for performance, including maintenance for things like indexes, corruption, etc.
Capacity — Helping to plan for future growth. Troubleshooting — Being able to respond to issues and locate the root cause quickly. ETL — Integration and migration of data between systems. Development — Writing stored procedures, designing tables. But the list does help frame the DBA role for others to understand. The above list helps others to understand why the DBA role is as a vertical role.
If a DBA is doing their job well then the number of issues are minimal. To have less people questioning what we do all day long we need to transform the DBA role into a horizontal role. A horizontal role is one that thinks about, and includes, other teams. With the DBA role so focused on data, and data the most critical asset any company owns, it makes sense for the DBA to work across teams and not alone. DBAs must make certain that data is being treated right as it flows in, around, and out.
With so many tasks to manage, and only so many hours in the day, DBAs turn to automation to get the job done. Sure, it would be great to hire additional staff to offload the work. But headcount is harder to come by than a few PowerShell scripts.
Automation is key to transforming the DBA role from vertical to horizontal. You know who does automation well these days? Check out this list of services from Azure :. This is because more and more organizations are seeking to mine all the information they can, in order to make better business decisions. In most organizations, the number and size of databases grows rapidly. It is the responsibility of the DBA to watch data growth, and plan how best to deal with it.
This may include archiving it, increasing the size of current hardware, or adding new hardware. It is often the responsibility to the DBA to perform impact analysis before changes are made, implement changes, test changes, and document them.
The foundation of all efficient and scalable databases is good database design. DBAs should be proactive in their work, and one of the best ways to be proactive is to develop sound database best practices and to implement them.
The better organized and managed the database operations, the more efficient they will be. A DBA needs to ensure that their databases are available to users when they need access to data. There are many different ways to help ensure high availability, including use of log shipping, clustering, database mirroring, and other technologies.
One of the most time-consuming of all database tasks is installing, configuring, patching and upgrading SQL Server instances.
While installing and configuring new instances is relatively straight-forward, it can be time consuming. In others, the DBA is responsible for building, installing, and configuring their own hardware. In addition, DBAs may also perform regular hardware troubleshooting and maintenance. Over time, the load put on individual databases changes.
DBAs are responsible for monitoring workloads and figuring out how to maximize hardware resources to get the best SQL Server performance. This may involve moving a database from a busy server to a less busy server.
It can also involve server consolidation or virtualization. Writing and maintaining documentation is probably the most boring and loathed task that a DBA will encounter. If there is no documentation, then there is no easy way to rebuild the current infrastructure should major problems arise.
It is important for a DBA to develop and maintain good relationships with their manager, and with any other managers in the organization that they work with. Techniques like online backups, clustering, replication, and standby databases are all tools the DBA can use to ensure higher availability. Also, the type of data stored in databases has changed, from structured data in neat rows and columns to unstructured data such as documents, images, sound files, and even fingerprints.
Both trends have the same result: larger databases. The time required to do simple operations like copying a table can be prohibitive unless done correctly. Data Extraction, Transformation, and Loading ETL In data warehouse environments, a key task is efficiently loading the data warehouse or data mart with large volumes of data extracted from multiple existing production systems.
Often these production systems have different formats than the standardized definitions in the data warehouse, so data must be transformed or "cleansed" before loading. Extracting the data may or may not be the DBA's responsibility in a given company, but making sure what is extracted is useful is, and the DBA is a key part of the team.
The bottom line for IT leaders Increasing feature sets in popular database products have steadily increased the number of things a DBA has to master.
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