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Many shops in Germany are cutting rather than adding staff. If a contractor can do both basic system admin tasks and DBA work, his marketability is higher.
In my current project, we are forced to work with the Solaris Admins quite a bit in an effort to consolidate servers and simplify the administration of the Solaris servers that we use. For negotiating, i find my limited Sys Admin knowledge helpful, and wish i had more.
Every shop is different though.
In fact, I usually have rather bad luck than good luck. In everything... :-)Quote:
Originally posted by pando
julian you are probably the lucky one :D
I agree with your second part where you are talking about PL/SQL and tool knowledge. Do not agree with the first part where you are undermining the fact that DBA's knowledge about OS is not very important and you say that should be limited to the extent of knowing few OS commands only. Well, DBA role has become very expanded now and which specific DBA role you meant, I am not sure, probably Application DBA you meant. But let me tell you one thing, unless you have a sound OS knowledge you can never do a good Database tuning. In fact in order to create a good structured database, you need to have a good knowledge about the server (and that implies as how OS on the system works) as the first step so that you can spread over the datafiles and other database related files on different mount points. A bad configured database is the starting point for all the performance problems in future. There are many other database capacity planning stuff, for which definitely you need to have a sound system knowledge. I remember, about a year back we had problems in running about 25-30 test and dev instances on our HP server and there was some "undocumented" concepts of "memory-window" which we could successfully use to run all these instances, thanks to a DBA in our group who had sound knowledge of HP. Another example I can sight is of implementation of MC Service Guard on our HP Server(incidentally XP-512 or 1024 concepts are so important for DBA's to know at times) for high availability. We had system experts there to implement but it could not have been a successful implementation until a DBA also worked together with him, how can you expect a DBA to contribute in these activities if he only knows a dozen of OS commands only? What you are hinting at may be good for a junior or intermediate DBA but, I feel that no matter how "advanced" or "sophisticated" features Oracle comes out with, it can never replace the flexibility of shell scripts and also can never be best "exploited" by DBAs until they know what it does ultimately behind the scene, I mean internally it will be executing the OS commands. I know why Oracle is trying to come out with these kinds of "shields" between OS and database, because they know that in present days virtually everyone wants to take a course and pass 4-5 papers and become DBA, these kinds of overnight born DBAs sure would not like to understand the real concepts and they need a GUI interface to do DBA stuff. They deliver the minimum what are expected but when the "Big" problems start coming, they start looking for a seasoned DBA and sure he/she will have sound knowledge about OS and internals of database.Quote:
Originally posted by julian
There are couple of dozens of commands in Unix which you need as a DBA. It is almost an assumption that a DBA knows the OS commands. But see, with the new versions of Oracle, you do more and more from within Oracle itself. You don't have to know shell scripts or whatever...
And yes, I think that knowledge of PL/SQL and other Oracle development tools are more important for an Oracle DBA than knowing in depth of OS. But I might be wrong...
I wanted to emphasize very strongly here in this forum the need for a sound knowledge about system and OS as well while some one is trying to take on a DBA job as profession. A certification for OS after OCP certainly helps in that direction irrespective of the fact whether for a job they ask "explicitly" about System/OS knowledge together with DBA knowledge or not.
[Edited by freemind on 10-15-2002 at 03:28 PM]
Hi folks,
Just my attempt to balance this out.
Excuse me Julian, if I pre-empt your response.
Sanjay I believe Julian said that there are a couple of dozen OS commands a DBA *needs*. This is different to what a DBA may actually know and is basically true however, most DBAs I know have a great deal more skill than that.
This does not mean they are Sys Admins or even know as much as dedicated Sys Admin would do.
A job spec requiring DBA and sys admin skills is not necessarily asking for a combined DBA/SA
I doubt any DBA would dispute the need to have a fairly in depth knowledge of how the server and OS functions but surely most sites large enough to run a number of instances would be likely to have a dedicated Sys Admin.
I'm sure there are a number of sites that would disprove that statement but how big, business critical and heavily used are they?
Just trying to add fuel to the fire :-)
Cheers
Nick
Let's sum this up in a nutshell shall we?
Knowledge is good!
It's all good.
Thank You;
MH
No I did not try to offend Julian, it is a healthy discussion, no one is right no one is wrong! In fact I was trying to put my viewpoint across, yes I did refer to some of the points which Julian pointed out, but not criticising him. I respect his opinions.Quote:
Originally posted by ngdh
Just trying to add fuel to the fire :-)
Thank you freemind and Julian,
The discussion does have me thinking. I recently finished my 8i certification and now I am trying to choose between PL/SQL or Solaris certification (and the 9i upgrade of course). If you were to prioritize between those three, which order would you do them? I intend to do them all, eventually, but I would like to get the most in the short run. Thank you for your opinions.
bharris
OCP 8i
I think it really depends on your short term needs. If you are currently required to do lots of system admin and you struggle due to lack of knowledge then do the Solaris certification. On the other hand, if you are required to do more PL/SQL than system admin do the PL/SQL exam.
IMHO You can not be a good DBA without having very good, even exceptional, PL/SQL skills. No matter how well you know the OS, if you don't understand the Oracle kernel and how its native programming tools operate with it you're not a DBA in my book.
I do agree that OS knowledge is important, but remember that lots of big shops have a range of hardware. I regularly work for companies that have UNIX from multiple vendors along with Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Linux. I know enough to do my job on all of these but I would never attempt to do a system admin job in any of them.
As a DBA your focus should be on learning Oracle. If you have the time to advance your OS knowledge further that's great, but not at the expense of Oracle knowledge. If the company is serious they will have DBAs and system admin staff. Except in small companies, being a DBA is a fulltime job.
Remember, it's only my opinion :)
Cheers
As a DBA, you are pretty much assumed to have some basic knowledge about the OS, be that Windows 2000 or Unix. If you want to get that knowledge by getting yourself certified in AIX or Solaris, that is fine. I just don't think it is necessary nor does it make you more marketable as a DBA. You can learn all the basic commands in unix in an hour reading a book. Most big companies have separate job titles. They will either hire someone to do DBA or sys admin, but not both. Sys Admin has root access. The only times I see a DBA will need the root access will be to create raw devices or doing an oracle install. It is unlikely the sys admin will give the DBA the root access. It is a CYA issue. So what's the point of getting certified in Solaris? If small companies cannot afford to hire separate staff for sys admin and DBA, do you really want to work for one?
I see however the advantage of getting a certificate in Peoplesoft Admin or Siebel Admin. In my companies and I think other big companies also, the DBA has to do Peoplesoft admin as well. Having the Peoplesoft or siebel knowledge when you are asked to tune the ERP or the CRM is definitely a plus.
Well I guess the shop I am now can be consider *BIG*.
So basically the job is divided into departments, DBAs here do *zero* PL/SQL related stuffs so basically PL/SQL for them is useless (however some of them who came from smaller shops did do PL/SQL). They do a lot of shell scripting for monitoring purposes since Patrol is such a useless tool (not my opinion, but from production peeps). Since shell scripts == UNIX commands I guess in this shop UNIX skills counts much more than PL/SQL. Also considering 90% of Datawarehouse and Datamart ETL processes are done with shell scripts (many of them generated by ETI*Extract) when they have to diagnostic process failure they would have to read the scripts (ouch there are like 1000 ETL processes going everyday without exaggerating)
In smaller shops you do a bit of everything, basically there are two situations
1. if you get involved a lot with development peeps then you have to know PL/SQL
2. if you are involved with production in smaller shops then you have to know more OS skills than PL/SQL
In big shops where everything is divided I still believe OS skill is more relevant if UNIX is used. Windows you dont need that much knowledge. Well you cannot know much anyway, if is not command line based and almost everything is solved by rebooting
It also depends with what Oracle options you are working. For example I recall when I was in a place where they used Advanced Replication extensively the DBA had to know quite a lot of PL/SQL since all conflict resolutions were baed by PL/SQL packages developed by development DBAs
Then if we want to talk about Oracle Support onsite DBAs then their PL/SQL knowledge (even SQL) is very limited, they are good in troubleshooting RDBMS problems.
Since I have been in quite a few places I have had to do a bit of everything and the problem is when they send you to a new place they send you as an expert of everything even you dont have a single clue :D