Let's continue our discussion on the Non-Technical Art of Being a Successful DBA. The intent of this blog is to help administrators design and standardize on a formalized design review process. The goal of the design review process is to identify and address application design, process flow, program logic and SQL statement problems early in the development lifecycle. Identifying these issues early in the development lifecycle allows them to be more easily addressed than if they were to be identified during later stages.

I absolutely and firmly believe that Data Administrators are the unsung heroes of the Information Technology profession. This blog will be shorter than most. The reason is that I don't consider myself qualified to instruct others in the Data Administration function. I will state that after twenty years of working as DBA, I can perform the basic functions fairly well when I need to. The intent of this blog is to provide readers with a launching point to start their education and stress the importance of effective data resource management.

Let’s start our series on the Non Technical Art of Being a Successful DBA by covering the art of good documentation. Although the importance of a well thought out and detailed documentation library is blatantly obvious, creating documentation is the task most often postponed by an overworked DBA unit.

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.

Oracle 10G introduced a new type of tablespace called a Bigfile Tablespace. When I read the 10G New Features manual and found out that you could create a terabyte sized datafile using the Bigfile option, I wanted to immediately find an environment that had enough free disk to allow me to create my first terabyte datafile. That was over a year ago and I still haven't found a server with a free terabyte of disk that I can use for testing. Even though I haven't made it into the terabyte datafile club yet, I thought I would discuss Bigfile tablespaces in this blog.

I have taught hundreds of people how to administer Oracle during my career as an Oracle instructor. For those of you just entering this profession, here is my most sage piece of advice:

"The hallmark of a good DBA is not knowing everything, it's knowing where to look when you don't."

I thought it might be beneficial for us to review some of the various technical resources currently available to us. You'll find a listing of my favorite authors, bloggers and websites in this blog. The list will also include my favorite educational website of all time, the Oracle Knowledge Center. I'll be off on vacation next week, so I'll see you in two weeks!

I thought I’d provide you with a couple of quick SQL*PLUS tips and tricks this week. Some of the features are new in 10G, while others are available in earlier releases. I think you’ll find them all to be very helpful.

I thought I would deviate from my usual discussion on 10G technical topics for one blog. I’d like to talk about non-technical skill sets and the important role they play in our careers.

It used to be that you could get by with a total lack of interpersonal skills in our profession. Well those days are long gone. If you want to succeed, you’ll need to learn how to communicate effectively and play well with others. This blog contains a few pearls of wisdom, and a story or two, to help you become a well-rounded technician that is on the fast track to a successful career.

Let’s finish this series on 10G Data Pump by investigating the Data Pump Import utility. In this blog, we'll learn how to execute 10G Data Pump Import and take advantage of some of its more popular features.

This is part three of a series on 10G Data Pump. In part one, we reviewed a few of the new features that make Data Pump Export and Import attractive alternatives to their ancestors, Export and Import. Part two focused on the 10G Data Pump architecture. We continue the discussion in this blog by learning how to use 10G Data Pump Export to "pump" data out of an Oracle database.