ROLE OF A DBA

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Originally posted by marist89
It's YOUR responsibility to make sure your manager knows what you are doing.

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No and Yes. Depends on your manager, his IT-knowledge and your internal strenth in the company.

I personaly feel that it is my responsibility Jeff, that my boss knows what he is doing whentaking IT-decisions. We are not an IT-company and very few people understand Oracle, databases, Solaris and OPS at the place where I work. I always have my say on whatever level the decision is being taken regardless of even my opinion is asked. But that's me. I am not the silent type. I know many people just stay behind their desk and do what they are told to do. They have their motives and own personal goals and all that's fine with me. They are not part of driving process in the comany for they might not even care what's going on in the company as far as they get their paycheck at the end of the month. People are very different, even we the Oracle people vary from opinion to opinion and from a point of view to a point of view. Some of us are obidient and perhaps the best of employess one can wish for, some of us are the rebelient type, we want it our way.

Back to your original question. On second thought I would answer No.

your manager may be clueless, but it's still your job to let him know what you do and why is it important.

In my 18 years experience, I worked with both IT organizations and NON-IT organizations. Some times it was very difficult to explain IT technology to the NON-IT senior managers. So I did not care, but I explained to them what computer can do and cannot do for an organization. Most of the managers (I was also one of the senior level managers) agreed. Ultimately, they reap the benefits after I computerized many business processes.

When I feel I am isolated, then I will not continue with the organization. This is the policy I have been following through out my life. Many companies think and do "isolation" punishment to their employees. This is worse than firing.

actually i got a question from the answer posted in this forum.
This just came up when i read each thread and came up with 3 questions.

!! just was curious to post this comment!!
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the slob says

1 hr downtime for a large ecommerce site cost: $10 million
1 hr downtime for a large bank cost: $100 million
1 DBA costs: $100,000/yr.
you'll prolly hire more DBAs..but I think you getthe picture. get a calculator and get a clue. cheers :-)

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ovidius says

BTW, aren't you sorry for such a waste? Sybase ASE is a server on which 95% of Wall Street is based... . And is a great technology.
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so was very curious to know for my personal information
which are the large ecommerce site/banks that run on Oracle database.?

if ovidius is right with the statistics figure , saying that 95% of the wall street is on sybase ase server,is it right statistics ?
also the liscence copy of orginal version of oracle is huge cost? what makes oracle strong than other databases ?
what conditions one can recommend to use oracle databases. ?

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Originally posted by theslob:
1 hr downtime for a large ecommerce site cost: $10 million
1 hr downtime for a large bank cost: $100 million
1 DBA costs: $100,000/yr.
you'll prolly hire more DBAs..but I think you getthe picture. get a calculator and get a clue. cheers :-)
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So far I have not seen any ecommerce company that does $87,600 Million yearly.

Also, one hour downtime in a large bank does not cost $100 Million.

I don't know about :
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1 hr downtime for a large ecommerce site cost: $10 million
1 hr downtime for a large bank cost: $100 million
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but: 1 hr downtime for a large stock market company
during stock session $1-10 millions - this is very possible.

Quote:

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Originally posted by marist89
It's YOUR responsibility to make sure your manager knows what you are doing.

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It is in a worker's best interest to inform his manager about his/her value to the company/project/department.

As a freelancer, marketing oneself is the difference between increasing your rate or extending the contract and losing business.

It is amazing to meet technically skilled people who miss opportunities because they are unable to gently remind their superiors how valuable they are. The flip side is the less than stellar people who do promote themselves constantly despite a lack of achievements.

In the US, "permanent employment" is an illusion unless you are a government employee. In that case, {insert your own remark about government employment here}.

Marketing/self promotion never hurts as long as you are delivering the goods.

My 2 cents or less.

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so was very curious to know for my personal information
which are the large ecommerce site/banks that run on Oracle database.?
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that wasn't the point, I deliberately exagerated to point out how ludicrous the topic is (are DBAs important??). And I was talking about large databases(DB2,Informix,Sybase, Oracle etc) in general and not only Oracle.

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if ovidius is right with the statistics figure , saying that 95% of the wall street is on sybase ase server,is it right statistics ?
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There are many reasons why Oracle is (was) not used in financial industry (Wall Street).

1 History
In late 1980's many companies wanted to shutdown their very costly main frames because of high maintenance cost, and realized Unix mid range computers was the alternate choice. At the same time, they wanted to choose the best RDBMS available in the market.
2 Technology:
Technically, Sybase was much superior than Oracle and Informix. Informix had market share of 60% in 1990. Sybase was the first RDBMS introduced server side stored procedures, packages, functions. Programmers were delighted on these functionality. In fact I evaluated Oracle and Sybase very closely in 1991. I found Sybase had many technical advantages over Oracle in 1991. And Sybase’s User Interface was very simple and was easy to develop application software. Powerbuilder was the most powerful software integrated with Sybase at that time to develop application software. Sybase first introduced hot backup concept in 1991. Later Oracle followed. In most of the OLTP benchmark tests, Sybase scored over Oracle. The Sybase’s TPC–A, TPC-B, TPC-C ratings were very high. Oracle required more disk space and more memory in order to get a reasonable performance where as Sybase required half the size of Oracle’s. Remember memory and disk were highly priced in early 1990s.

3 Price
Buying an RDBMS by a manufacturing company is entirely different when compared to by a financial company. Financial companies wanted to spend less money so that they would pay dividend to its share holders. They found cost of running a sybase system was much cheaper than that of Oracle. More over, they found that day-to-day OLTP system required faster response in order to satisfy their customers, hence they chose Sybase. The service level agreement price was (is) very high with Oracle. But, later they realized that Sybase could not handle a large volume of data. Hence, they chose Oracle for data mart/data warehouse type of applications and moved the OLTP data from Sybase to Oracle once in a week or in a month.

Since, Sybase has not been doing well for the past 3 years, many companies are now trying to migrate Sybase applications to Oracle /DB2.

Tamil selvan - Compliment !! Very good answer .