I received a cool compliment today from a peer who's a developer. He said, "You know, I really like having a DBA on my team!" I have to tell you, it made my whole day!
It led to a discussion about past experiences and expectations, and I shared something I thought was pretty much common knowledge: there are three types of DBAs. My peer was shocked, so maybe the knowledge isn't so common after all.
The three "flavors" of DBAs I define are:
- System, Operations, or Production Support DBAs - these DBAs write maintenance plans in notepad and have no qualms whatsoever about executing in command-line. They were DBAs in the old days, when we carved our own ICs out of wood. They will get your server and database back online fast - and with less data corruption than anyone else on the planet. They live for torn pages and I/O faults.
- Application Support DBAs - these DBAs are familiar with one or more (usually complex) applications. I'm talking PeopleSoft, Seibel, and SAP here. If you want to customize a screen or write a one-off web application, you desperately need these folks.
- Database Developers - these DBAs are ruthless bit-heads. They use bigint and byte fields for masking binary states. They can optimize a stored procedure in their sleep and wrap an API around a database so developers never have to consider writing SQL that directly hits tables. They are performance freaks that will work 18-hour days on weekends to test in Production - when it's "safe."
Do you think DBAs fall into these categories? Do you know any that do? Do you see yourself in there anywhere? Do you have more or less or different "flavors" for classifying DBAs?
:{> Andy
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