Originally posted by julian
Tha't's very good. But assuming all DBAs have the same knowledge level.
Ageed. A couple points to clarify:
1. I don't put a Jr. DBA on duty unless I think they can handle the responsibility and have the ability to realize when they're over their head. I had one Jr. DBA that never asked for help and constantly ended up going down the wrong road because he never stopped to ask for help. He never was on duty and doesn't work for me anymore.

2. I typically am the backup for new people on duty. This way if they get into trouble I can guide them on the correct decisions to get them out.

3. I put people on duty to get them up to speed so they have the same basic knowlege level. For requests that require specialized knowlege, we schedule those during normal working hours. If a global index goes unusable because some developer dropped a partition, I expect all my DBAs to know how to rebuild it. If somebody calls the duty pager and asks for java to be installed in the database because it's "Urgent", we simply won't do that after hours.