October 4, 2013 at 3:18 am
I have seen the same sort of ratios. Sometimes the ratios vary with role responsibilities, other times due to system specifics (e.g. where more effort is required) and, as always, vagaries down to role perceptions.
There appears to bee no rule of thumb that is reasonable to apply. Sensible management gages their specific situation, I guess.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
October 4, 2013 at 3:40 am
Worst 3 dbas supporting 4 developers. The manager just wanted the prestige and the job was more politics then doing any real good.
Typically, I support about 15+ developers, and they aren't always in the same country.
October 4, 2013 at 4:03 am
I am currently supporting 7 developers (one of whom works from a remote location). However, we have seen periods where we had 2 DBAs supporting about 24 developers (making for a reasonable ratio of 1:12).
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October 4, 2013 at 4:34 am
For me it like a scene from the film Zulu... I'm massively outnumbered from an enemy with very blunt instruments. The odd one can shoot but normally misses.
I have 22 developers who all love LinqSQL and 5 systems guys to support. They all call me the Guv'nor.. then I wake up.
October 4, 2013 at 5:26 am
victor.girling 17919 (10/4/2013)
For me it like a scene from the film Zulu... I'm massively outnumbered from an enemy with very blunt instruments. The odd one can shoot but normally misses.I have 22 developers who all love LinqSQL and 5 systems guys to support. They all call me the Guv'nor.. then I wake up.
Don't shoot 'til you see the WHERE of their SELECTs!!!
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
October 4, 2013 at 5:30 am
I'm a developer that asked for my own server instance. Since I have sysadmin rights to it, I guess I am my own dba. Lol. 1:1?
October 4, 2013 at 5:42 am
Two DBAs to about 19 developers. And they insist we handle stuff like backups and restores on development servers for them, "because the DBAs have always done that for us". I said yeah, my mum always used to do my washing, until I grew up and started doing it myself.
John
October 4, 2013 at 6:25 am
I've worked in numerous environment, and the ratios have been all over the place. One place I worked we had no DBA, but easily 20+ developers. Although, there was probably only 7 or so of us who did any SQL work. We likely didn't have a DBA because we were developing a product which used SQL Server. So, there wasn't anything for a DBA to maintain, as the databases where all on develop laptops or workstations. There was one place that was on the order of 1:10. Numerous other smaller shops (< 6 devs) we had no DBA. My present employer has 1 DBA. There are 22 "real" developers and I'm not sure how many implementation specialists who also do some simple SQL work. So, the ratio here is 1:22+.
Thanks,
MKE Data Guy
October 4, 2013 at 6:30 am
At one place 1:40
Another place 1:15
However for the latter, the SQL work required is much more intense and it could used another DBA
October 4, 2013 at 6:33 am
I have never worked in a shop that had even one DBA. My entire career of 30+ years has been small shops with four developers at most. I am the sole developer and we have two net admins. I am what some have called an accidental DBA. I've been pulled kicking and screaming into the DBA world. 🙂
Tom
October 4, 2013 at 6:55 am
We currently have 4 developers and I'm the 1 DBA, which seems like a good ratio. The last company I was at had 8 DBA's and 30-40 developers.
Of course, there is a pretty broad spectrum of what duties are assigned to a DBA. I tend to notice that when you get past a 4:1 ratio, you see the developers writing their own DDL and the DBA tends to be more of a systems administrator. I find that I'm mostly writing SSIS packages and troubleshooting performance issues these days, and I dole out advise on data modeling and the finer points of writing SQL, but very little actual code writing.
October 4, 2013 at 7:17 am
Mostly always being working on small companies with no DBA's and around 5-10 dev. But lat two positions on bigger companies I've seen awfull situation: one DBA for an horde of developers. First place, around 30 developers, 3 or 4 servers and many more instances. Second place, and current work, 4 servers, +20 instances, one DBA and +100 developers. From what I've seen so far, no too much tSQL interest on dev's side and the brand new idea is "MS SQL Server can't scale, let's try NoSQL" :pinch:
October 4, 2013 at 7:19 am
Anywhere between 1:7 and 1:40. The later was a pure admin type DBA job, the ones with the lower ratio tended to also involve a lot more development and architecture work.
My previous company was most likely the worst. 82 production databases, with dev and test environments for each, 22 developers in house AND supporting an off shore team that could be anything between 5 and 40 people depending on what project was going on. With me as the only DBA (most of the time, for a while had a backup DBA). I was the architect and production DBA, luckily the developers had pretty good T-SQL skills. I quit because of the hours needed to support both on and off shore.
October 4, 2013 at 8:24 am
I think the ratio you've seen, of 1 DBA to 10 developers is about right. I'd say it's either that or 1 DBA to 8 developers.
Rod
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