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The Non-Technical Art of Being a Successful DBA The Non-Technical Art of Being a Successful DBA

One of the benefits of my 20-year career (I think) is that most of the jobs I have held can be described as somewhat “unforgiving”, shall we say… What these jobs taught me is that I needed more than just technical expertise to become successful in my chosen profession. I quickly learned that becoming proficient at the various disciplines I will be discussing in upcoming blogs was just as challenging to me as honing my technical skill sets.

I’ve been able to learn from my mistakes and make changes in my technical and non-technical approach to database administration to overcome my shortcomings. I’d like to cover some of my personal best practices that have made my life as a DBA more productive and my customers and co-workers happier.
I'd like to take a minute to describe some of the jobs I've held and how they have taught me to learn the value of becoming proficient at both the technical and non-technical disciplines required to become a successful DBA. I'll continue this week's discussion with what I think is probably the most beneficial set of recommendations I could provide to you as readers. Some of the information is certainly "intuitively obvious" as my old boss used to say but it never hurts to have a refresher. In upcoming blogs, I'll remove the personal stuff and get down to the business of providing you with information on The Non-Technical Art of Being a Successful DBA. We will then return to the wonderful world of 10G administration.

There are numerous jobs where you have to be on top of your game at all times. The medical profession and police work come to mind when I think about folks that have to be "mistake free" to keep us all safe and healthy. I often remind myself that the stress I let my job generate for me is nothing compared to what these aforementioned folks must experience. Knowing that there is an 18 year old somewhere fighting and trying to stay alive in a foreign land helps me to keep my own career's stress in perspective.

As Oracle database administration goes, being an Oracle Instructor is about as unforgiving as it gets. You get dropped into a classroom that has twenty PCs running Oracle and twenty students depending upon you to teach them. My first attempts at teaching a dozen years or so ago could be described as "less than stellar." I had a review from my first class state "this was the most boring person I have ever met." I felt bad about that until my senior instructor showed me one of his first reviews. It had in big red letters at the top of the page "I HATED YOU." I felt better after reading that.

I must admit I was a little timid when I started, but those students that attended later classes know that I decided to let my own bombastic personality show through. Let's say that none of my subsequent classes were ever boring after that. I'm sure that previous statement will generate a comment or two from my fellow blogger and lifetime buddy Craig Mullins and possibly a few from my students.

After that less than glorious start, I worked hard to become a better instructor, eventually winning one of Oracle's top instructor awards with a 95% student approval rating. How I ever ended up in a teaching profession where the students graded the teacher, I'll never know. Just as a joke I started one class by stating "Oracle has instituted a new procedure that will allow me to grade your participation and learning skills and send them to your employers." The look on everyone's faces was priceless. I still view being asked by Oracle to certify fellow instructors as one the greatest achievements of my career. I took that job very seriously.

I can tell you one thing about Oracle DBA students, they are a rough bunch. I started a DBA I class by blowing up a database create and couldn't get it to work correctly after a second attempt This after doing it successfully hundreds of times. A corrupt drive on my PC was the culprit. After turning around and seeing the "who is this idiot" look on my student's faces, I suddenly felt like a wounded fish in the middle of a pack of hungry piranha.

Oracle instructors describe that problem with a single phrase "losing creditability with the class." You did that and you were lunchmeat. But I never let that potential loss of creditability prevent me from saying "I don't know, I'll get back to you." Or I would look up the information for the student on the spot. That provided two benefits: answering the question and showing students the importance of knowing where to look for the answers.

Assisting a class of twenty students through backup and recovery labs certainly helped my debugging skills. If you ever want to find out how bullet proof an Oracle database can be, watch 20 installations being abused by students in a backup and recovery class. I always started my backup and recovery class with this statement "The fastest way to lose your job in this profession is to lose data for your company. You can be a Tom Kyte and a Jonathan Lewis X 2, but if you can't recover a database, you aren't of any use to your employer." That always seemed to ensure that they paid attention during the remainder of the class. That was one class where I absolutely pounded information and best practices into their collective heads. We were all worn out by Friday.

I enjoyed teaching and became friends with each and every group of students I taught. I always felt sad when we parted and always worried that I missed that one tidbit of information that could help them.

On-site consulting is also a tough profession. The customer brings you into an environment that you know nothing (or little) about and expects you to be productive and solve their problems - immediately. That is as it should be. They pay a premium and expect good service. It is the consultant's fault if that doesn't happen. I liked that job because it was very challenging and forced me to continuously refine my skill sets and talents to keep my customers happy.

But I have had my fair share of sweaty palms at many a client site. I didn't have the luxury of being an Oracle consultant. They always seemed to have an endless stream of people to draw from for support. I usually ended up in a wiring closet with a manual in one hand and a keyboard in the other. I actually spent three weeks in a wiring closet at one client's site.

Remote database administration also requires excellent technical and non-technical skills. You must continuously strive to keep your customers happy, all of which hold you to a high standard. Describing competition in the remote DBA industry as fierce is like describing the Titanic as "having a small leak." To reinforce this point - right now I'm concerned that others will view this as me using this blog as a sales pitch, which often leads to a competitive firestorm. It is not intended that way. I admire everyone that works in the remote DBA profession. It is a very challenging job. I'm just describing the work that we do and what is expected of all remote services providers.

You become successful as a remote services company by providing a superior level of support to your customers. As a technician, it's a great job! You can be installing a RAC/LINUX environment in the morning and be debugging an Oracle Applications concurrent manager problem in the afternoon. From warehouses to HUGE web databases having thousands of concurrent users and from manufacturing to financials, you work on it all.

The Non-Technical Art of Being a Good DBA
I started off this blog describing some of my jobs not to impress you with my background but to hopefully help you understand how important it is to me to provide you with this new series of non-technical recommendations. These jobs quickly laid bare every hole in both my technical and non-technical approach to database administration. They not only laid them bare but also amplified their negative results. I found that becoming lax in the non-technical areas of database administration and not following my own best practices could create just as much havoc as a technical problem. As I have stated numerous times, some of us are brilliant and some of us are lucky. The rest of us have to be thorough.

To ensure that I did not allow a failure in non-technical areas to complicate my life as a DBA, I needed to learn how to document, communicate and follow my own best practices. I learned the tricks of the trade to reduce the amount of time it took me to administer my environments and ensure I didn't get paged at night. I found that I could trust some author's information and not others. I learned that by keeping my recovery skills sharp, I reduced my level of anxiety when I got one of those two in the morning "I think we just formatted one of your Oracle disks by mistake" calls (actually the caller stated they accidentally formatted the entire array consisting of dozens of disks by mistake). The list goes on and on…

To continue, here's a laundry list of what will be covered in upcoming blogs:

  • Why good documentation is so essential and documentation best practices
  • Naming conventions
  • The benefits of Data Administration or "Loving to Hate the Data Administrator". A reprise from Jim McQuade's excellent article here on DBAZine.
  • The key to successful application implementation - Design Review Meetings
  • Improving the speed and quality of database administration by keeping your environments organized and uncluttered
  • Creating and maintaining tips, tricks and problem resolution libraries
  • Script foraging
  • Reducing stress and preventing failed recoveries by keeping recovery skills sharp
  • The benefits of repeatable processes. If it worked that way once, it'll probably work that way again
  • Proceduralizing the change management and production turnover process
  • Time Management and the art of project and process time estimation
  • Maintaining good relationships with customers, end-users and fellow technical personnel
  • The Foot Rule of Thumb
  • Knowing where to look when you don't know the answer (reprise from earlier blog)
  • Using Service Level Agreements to ensure your internal and external customers know what to expect from you
  • Monitoring by day so you don't get called at night
  • Monitoring space growth and performance statistics historically
  • Paranoid administration best practices. Many of which are stolen from probably the most paranoid (and error free) DBA I have ever met. Jeff "I never met a problem prevention method I didn't like" Kondas.
  • Preventing errors from reoccurring by creating and following Corrective Action Procedures

Some of the topics will require an entire blog to cover while other blogs may group many topics together. The intent of this series of upcoming blogs is to help beginners create an approach to improving in non-technical areas and act as a refresher to those of us that have been in this profession for a while. Some of these recommendations come from problems that have occurred as a result of me not placing the same emphasis on non-technical areas as I did the technical ones. Many of the recommendations come from my experiences working as a mainframe DBA that, as we all know, is a very structured environment that demands rigorous adherence to best practices. The remainder comes from my experiences working as an educator, consultant and services provider.

Thanks for Reading,

Chris Foot
Oracle Ace


Monday, July 24, 2006  |  Permalink |  Comments (5)
trackback URL:   http://www.dbazine.com/blogs/blog-cf/chrisfoot/blogentry.2006-07-22.2204956318/sbtrackback

Excellent post!!

Posted by amansharma81 at 2006-07-25 07:22 AM
Hi sir,
My self is Aman Sharma.This is one of the best posts I have ever read about how one can groom himself in the field of Oracle DBA.I shall be looking forward for the next series of the blogs for the similar category.
Sir,I wanted to ask one thing for a very long time.Sir can you please tell me how one can go for that Oracle Certified Trainer course/exam that you undertook?I want to take that exam/credential but I have not been able to find the relevant information about it yet or it may be that I am not looking in the right place for it.Please guide me for this.
In wait for the upcoming posts.
With best regards.
Aman Sharma

Didn't Want to Let You Down

Posted by cmullins at 2006-07-27 11:48 AM
Hey Chris, I saw your blog and didn't want to let you down, so I'm replying to this comment ("I must admit I was a little timid when I started, but those students that attended later classes know that I decided to let my own bombastic personality show through. Let's say that none of my subsequent classes were ever boring after that. I'm sure that previous statement will generate a comment or two from my fellow blogger and lifetime buddy Craig Mullins and possibly a few from my students.")...

You? Timid? I don't believe it. What would your lovely wife say about you ever being timid? I think even on your most "timid" day you are more engaging and entertaining that most! Then again, I wasn't in that first "boring" class you taught...

Excellent

Posted by edwards at 2006-07-28 11:31 AM
This is an excellent article! Thank you, Bill Thater for covering this in this week's Log Buffer -- http://gruntdba.wordpress.com/2006/07/28/log-buffer-3 .
 

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