What Makes a Top Flight Oracle DBA?

How to Obtain the Skills and Experience You Need to Become a High-Paid Oracle Database Administrator.

Look at the business facts:

Database is the heart of today’s enterprise.

The whole IT business works around databases.

Oracle is the leading enterprise database server.

That makes an Oracle Database Administrator (DBA) so special. As you can see, Oracle DBAs play critical roles in IT, no doubt that experienced DBAs are in high demand and get paid well.

What Are Oracle DBAs Doing at Work

Oracle DBAs are responsible for the development, design, implementation and maintenance of one or multiple Oracle database servers. These database servers support mission critical business applications in client-server structure or web-based architecture. These applications could be built in Microsoft .Net framework or J2EE platform. Some applications might be extremely complex. Oracle databases also support data mart, data warehouse, and business intelligence systems.

Oracle DBA’s daily administration work includes database server monitoring, performance tuning, and database backup and recovery. From time to time, Oracle DBAs are required for installation, upgrade, configurations of Oracle database software, and creating new database instances.

In most organizations, database design is a big part of DBA’s task. Oracle DBAs are good at designing logical database model by creating entity relationship diagram (ERD) using case design tools such as Oracle Designer and Sybase PowerDesigner. Oracle DBAs must be able to design the physical data models with schema, roles, tablespaces, tables, views, and other database objects.

Technical Environment

As an Oracle DBA, you may work in the development environment, production environment, or both.

In a heavy development environment, you must provide the expertise in guiding the developers in database platform and design, recommending database design alternatives and participate in design reviews. There will also be customer and end user interaction to ensure their needs are being met from the database side as well. You must be able to identify data needs, such as access, protection, quality and maintenance requirements. DBAs in development environment may be required to code stored procedures and packages to implement business rules.

In the production environment, your task is focused on availability, performance, and security. Your job could be making the database available 7/24 by implementing advanced Oracle technologies such as parallel server and standby database. You may need to tune the database constantly to optimize the transaction processes. You must have a solid backup/recovery plan and you always have to deal with the security processes and procedures to make sure your data is safe.

Skills for Top Flight DBAs

Top-level Oracle DBAs demonstrate the following expert knowledge and skills:

1. Relational database management system (RDBMS) concepts, design, and deployment.

2. Designing, developing, and supporting large RDBMS in the Oracle 8i or 9i environments.

3. Mastering Oracle database software for installation, upgrading, and configuration.

4. Installing and managing Oracle Parallel Server (OPS).

5. Concepts and practices on logical and physical database design.

6. Skills for database performance tuning – including server tuning and application tuning.

7. Developing and implementing backup and recovery plans.

8. Writing SQL query scripts and operating system level scripts to monitor database and perform DBA tasks.

9. Writing PL/SQL stored procedures and packages to implement business logic.

10. Using case tools for data modeling, analyzing business rules and creating entity relationship diagram.

11. Using Oracle Enterprise Manager to perform DBA tasks.

12. Using Oracle RMAN to perform backup/recovery tasks.

13. Data Warehouse and data mart physical structures and design.

14. Using ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) tools such as PowerMart / Informatica.

15. Some knowledge and working experience on other databases such as IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server.

16. Fundamental knowledge of operating systems (UNIX, Windows, etc) and networking (TCP/IP, Novel, Internet, etc.)

17. Knowledge on specific industry – banking, financial, insurance, retail, etc.

How to Obtain Oracle DBA Skills and Experience

There are two kinds of skills in IT – intelligence based skills and experience-based skills. Programming skills, for instance, are intelligence-based skills that count on your brain cells. On the other hand, DBA skills are more likely experience based. DBA skills are obtained from the actual work.

If you are in a database related position, you can take advantage of the environment and build these skills that I listed above. If you have a IT job but it is not directly related to database tasks on the server side, you may talk to the DBA to give you certain level of access to the database so you can play with it. Most programmers and developers have enough database privileges that they can use to work and play in order to gain database server experience.

Even if you don’t have access to Oracle database at work, or don’t work on an IT job at all, you can still get hands-on skills and experience with Oracle database and market your self as a experienced Oracle DBA for job switching or re-joining the workforce. All you need is to build an Oracle database environment on your PC, and then, work, play, create, break, do whatever you like on it. That’s how you get the hands-on experience.

You can download the fully functional Oracle database software for trail/testing purpose from Oracle website. Oracle database is available in different editions – Personal, Standard, and Enterprise. You may start with the Personal Edition that is smaller. If you want to explore more advanced Oracle technologies, use the Enterprise Edition. Oracle database software can be installed on WindowsNT/2000/XP and Linux. If your PC is running on Windows 2000 Professional, XP, or Linux, you’ll be able to put Oracle database on it.

You need to become a member of Oracle Technology Network in order to download Oracle software. The membership is free. You just need to go to http://otn.oracle.com/ to sign up. After you create you account with user/password, you can go to http://otn.oracle.com/software/content.html to download Oracle database software.

Oracle database software comes with full set documentations in HTML and PDF format. By following the instructions in the documentation, you should have no problem to install the software, create a database instance, and start to play with it. Oracle Technology Network provides a lot of useful information to help you obtain skills and build experience in Oracle database.

Since Oracle is such a popular database, there are tons of technical books and free resources online that you can use. The following link provides online resources on database related topics.
Online Resources for Database

Education and Certifications

Most Oracle DBAs hold a Bachelor’s Degree at least. A major in Computer Science or IT related field is preferred. However Oracle DBAs come from very diversified academic background. I’ve met top level DBAs who were educated in Chemistry, Mining Engineering, Political Science, Linguistics, etc. In IT industry, experience is more countable. If you work to build your experience, you can become a successful Oracle DBA.

Oracle DBA certification is one of the highly valued credentials in IT industry. If you plan to work your way to become a top flight Oracle DBA, certification is strongly recommended. You can find detailed information about Oracle DBA certification at Oracle’s website by clicking http://www.oracle.com/education/certification/.

August 25, 2008 · Filed Under Information Technology

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