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Database Administration
With the current economic slowdown, today's IT managers are
being more careful with their budgets and are looking for
greater efficiencies. The most vulnerable personnel in the
IT departments are the "superstars," such as the highly
skilled and highly compensated database administrators. Many
organizations are finding that remote DBA services can offer
better DBA management at a better price than hiring internal
DBAs. In this article, I'll take a look at the current DBA
crisis and show you how remote DBA services can help.
The DBA job crisis
DBAs have always been prima donnas, demanding extra perks
such as a private office, expensive training (e.g., the
Alaskan cruises for DBAs offered by the Geek Cruise
Corporation), and flexible hours.
There is a natural barrier to entry into the DBA ranks
because of the dual requirement of being skilled in both
oral and written communications and having superior
technical ability. Because DBAs are charged with the overall
design and implementation of applications, they must be
knowledgeable in all areas of business administration and be
able to converse fluently with accountants, manufacturing
managers, and other business professionals. Many DBAs
possess master's degrees from major universities, some with
MBAs or master's degrees in computer engineering.
There is also the matter of the huge scope of the database
software. For example, Oracle has evolved into one of the
world's most complex database management systems, and it
takes years of training to master all of the complexities of
the Oracle database. Just as the medical profession has
segmented into specialty areas because of its complexity,
Oracle DBAs are also segmenting themselves into specialty
areas, targeting Oracle DBA niche markets such as data
warehousing, performance tuning, and Oracle applications
support. It's very hard to find an experienced Oracle DBA
general practitioner.
Companies are struggling to attract DBA talent with enough
experience to ensure continuous availability of their
databases. The downtime for many production databases is
often measured in tens of thousand of dollars per minute,
and it is very risky to entrust these databases to
beginners.
Since many companies have been unable to attract DBA talent,
several approaches have been tried to fill the market need.
Grow your own DBA
Some companies undertake to educate an intelligent junior
employee in database administration. Although the cost for
the full set of DBA training by Oracle is over $70,000, many
companies have successfully used this approach. The drawback
is that the company often loses these new DBAs as soon as
they're trained because their HR departments are unable or
unwilling to increase the DBA's salary to the market rate.
It's difficult for many HR departments to justify the salary
of the Oracle DBA at the same level of a vice president, and
it's impossible for most companies to raise the salary of a
$40,000/year IT employee to $120,000 per year. Hence, most
of these DBAs leave their companies soon after completing
their training.
Remote DBA services
Many companies are abandoning full-time employee DBAs in
favor of remote Database support. These remote DBA companies
leverage a shared skill pool and can offer remote DBA
support cheaper than having an expensive full-time DBA.
Companies are saving tens of thousands of dollars yearly by
replacing expensive full-time DBAs with remote DBA services.
These services hire a pool of highly trained certified DBAs
and place them in response centers where they can constantly
monitor client databases. There are currently over 100
companies offering remote DBA services.
What We Offer
- Install, configure, migrate and manage Oracle, Sybase,
Ms SQL, Mysql, Pgsql and DB2
- Support all databases under Linux, HP Unix, Sun Solaris,
Windows
and IBM AIX, z/OS
- Web and scripts development to access, backup and
restore databases.
- Monitoring, tuning and performance improvement
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