"It was a wonderful experience interacting with you and appreciate the way you have planned and executed the whole publication process within the agreed timelines.”
Subrat SaurabhAuthor of Kuch Woh Pal
What skills set the database administrator (DBA) apart from other technologists? Of the many responsibilities laid
upon a DBA, which cannot be performed by someone else? Adding database accounts? Creating tables and indexes?
Installing and configuring databases? Optimizing the database and the applications that access and manipulate it?
All of these things are regularly performed by people who do not consider themselves database administrators.
They consider themselves to be programmer/analysts, to be application developers, to be managers and directors,
and they do all these things just to be able to move forward with their own job. Most application developers know
how to run the Oracle Universal Installer—it’s just another graphical application, and these days accepting all the
default choices is a perfectly valid way to get the job done. Adding database accounts? That’s easy! Granting database
privileges? Just give ’em “DBA” or “SYSDBA” and no more problems! Creating tables and indexes? C’mon, that’s more
of a developer’s job than the DBA’s job, isn’t it? Tuning Oracle databases is mostly about crafting efficient
SQL statements, and while this job often falls to DBAs, it is best handled by the developers and programmers who
write the SQL in the first place.
Sachin Srivastava
Sachin Srivastava is an Oracle OCM. He has written books on a variety of IT
topics including SQL, performance tuning, Linux, backup and recovery, RMAN,
and database administration. Sachin also teaches Oracle classes online and does
volunteer/freelancer DBA work for a variety of customers across the globe.
