September 11, 2008 at 11:54 am
Steve Jones - Editor (9/11/2008)
Mark,The problem is that this guy might have been "successful" as a DBA at his last job. Perhaps another group ran backups using Tivoli or something like that and he never had to do it.
Andy Warren and I had this debate when he was amazed a few years ago at hiring DBAs. He found that some of the poorer candidates, like the one you had, were actually successful for years as DBAs because they didn't have to do much and they didn't have any big failures.
Course he could just be lying as well.
Maybe you guys could start posting where these guys who "don't have to do much" are working, so I could get one of those jobs? I don't know what I'm doing either, but I'm doing too much of it . . .
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"stewsterl 80804 (10/16/2009)I guess when you stop and try to understand the solution provided you not only learn, but save yourself some headaches when you need to make any slight changes."
September 11, 2008 at 11:59 am
this guy was outta work!
Steve - That could be... or maybe they subbed out thier environments to someone like SunGard or some other hosting company that did the work for them... but still as a DBA you should know how to do a backup. Even in those types of environments I've worked in it's common to take a backup and bring it down for testing purposes
September 11, 2008 at 12:00 pm
jcrawf02 (9/11/2008)
... I don't know what I'm doing either, but I'm doing too much of it . . .
"All I want is an honest week's pay for an honest day's work." --Steve Martin
:hehe:
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[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
September 11, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Wayne West (9/11/2008)
jcrawf02 (9/11/2008)
... I don't know what I'm doing either, but I'm doing too much of it . . ."All I want is an honest week's pay for an honest day's work." --Steve Martin
:hehe:
Don't we all!! :hehe:
September 11, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Hi All,
I know lot of people with the position DBA who are actually business superusers who manage the application, user access, data as managed by application functionality and they are actually hard workes and do very good job! They are not technical DBAs as we on this site think of DBAs. But they manage data and users through the application and by their managers definitions they are database administrators. Some of these application even have backup functionality when you can press a button in the application and your DB is backed up - good job the app developers! For another example Microsoft Sharepoint administrator can create a new sharepoint database using Sharepoint functionality. So I would not discriminate between the people who backs up a database using Management Studio and who backs up the database using other SW.
Regards,Yelena Varsha
September 13, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Steve Jones - Editor (9/11/2008)
Mark,The problem is that this guy might have been "successful" as a DBA at his last job. Perhaps another group ran backups using Tivoli or something like that and he never had to do it.
Andy Warren and I had this debate when he was amazed a few years ago at hiring DBAs. He found that some of the poorer candidates, like the one you had, were actually successful for years as DBAs because they didn't have to do much and they didn't have any big failures.
Course he could just be lying as well.
That is a common issue we ran into when my company was hiring more people to work on SQL recently. Many of the people claiming to be senior DBAs did not really know very much of what we expected a Senior DBA to know. When we probed deeply it turned out that many of them were actually quite successful and good at what they did, but what they did for their company was very narrow indeed. One gentlemen we interviewed was accustomed to being responsible for backups, restores and very little else. Other teams in the company he worked for handled things like validating stored procedures before moving into production, designing and normalizing the tables, and designing the database file structures, etc.
I suppose a lot of it depends on what you mean by DBA. In some companies, the DBA responsibilities can cover absolutely everything pertaining to SQL except developing the front ends the users see, and in others it can be very narrow, and in yet others there are DBA teams with each person having a specific specialty within SQL.
Personally, I try to take the approach of being well rounded even if my job duties do not directly require it, but many other people prefer to be highly specialized.
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Timothy A Wiseman
SQL Blog: http://timothyawiseman.wordpress.com/
September 15, 2008 at 8:38 am
timothyawiseman (9/13/2008)
That is a common issue we ran into when my company was hiring more people to work on SQL recently. Many of the people claiming to be senior DBAs did not really know very much of what we expected a Senior DBA to know. When we probed deeply it turned out that many of them were actually quite successful and good at what they did, but what they did for their company was very narrow indeed. One gentlemen we interviewed was accustomed to being responsible for backups, restores and very little else. Other teams in the company he worked for handled things like validating stored procedures before moving into production, designing and normalizing the tables, and designing the database file structures, etc. ...
Wow. I've heard of such specialization, and I'm sure someone who is such a specialized DBA would know more about their specific area, but I've almost always been solo in my gigs. Just call me Billy the JOAT: Jack of all trades (Master of none) 😀
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[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
September 22, 2008 at 11:30 am
Cheating isn't exactly a new thing. What I never understand is when people talk about the 'good old days' like everything were perfect. Yeah I guess kids cheating today is worse than African Americans being hung or not allowed in certain areas. There are many problems today but for a lot of people the 'good old days' weren't exactly good at all. So are we really that much worse now than we were in the past?
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