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The DBA as a Power Broker
By Eric Gross | December 10, 2008
Managing databases is an intricate endeavor. At a certain point in your career you’ve started writing scripts to accomplish various tasks. Writing the scripts turns out to be the easy part. The difficulty surrounds properly documenting them all, which is why most of this intelligence remains within the confines of the creator limiting its value. By publishing your productivity enhancements and properly documenting them, you allow others to benefit which in turn increases your value. Others can follow in your footsteps and even build on your work.
Images of database professionals sequestered in the basement, scattering like cockroaches when the boss comes looking for a report, represent the distant past. Perpetually on the receiving end of demands, DBAs were dealt and forced to accept change requests to make ‘this table’ or ‘that stored procedure’. Eventually it becomes necessary to perform far more involved tasks such as migrations and upgrades which empower the DBA to work with a variety of departmental resources such as storage, networking, and development. The increased interdependencies elevate the DBA role in the organization resulting in the coalescense of organizational hierarchies. The next step is for the DBA to begin to source initiatives rather than exclusively receiving orders. It makes sense that database management priorities should rise to the forefront as the importance of data itself has become increasingly intense, albeit in a lagging fashion.
In technology, a strategy that ignores the demands of information is a strategy doomed to fail.
Topics: Organization