Media Coverages
September 26, 2008
Leveraging Automation Database Skills Shortage: Are you prepared for the inevitable?
By Robert Gardos, GridApp
Industry experts have been warning of a looming shortage of skills in the data center for the past few years. The real question is how do you protect your organization from such a loss? With only a handful of skilled database administrators and talented workers, automation is the answer. By implementing data center and database automation technologies high-level IT experts, including DBAs, can focus on strategic issues--allowing junior staff to perform tasks traditionally executed by more skilled workers. This is a win-win situation for business decision makers and allows the highly skilled DBAs to focus on revenue-generating strategy, while the less skilled employees maintain compliance metrics and best practices. Rob Gardos will share best practices for implementing automation and discuss the ways in which it actually protects businesses from the imminent shortage of talent.
Preparing for the IT Skills Shortage
The rise of the machines has been unfairly articulated--in movies, in the media and in business discussions. Automation has been seen on many levels as anything but a force of positive change in the world and for business. On the contrary, with today's shortage of skilled workers and an unstable economy, business decision makers have found themselves in a Catch 22. They can pay a premium and hire more expert IT staff, thus taking a toll on their budget or they can tighten their purse strings and work their existing employees to death, thus becoming victims of high employee turn-over and poor job performance. What is the best approach in these economically challenging times? Of all the money being spent on data management (much of which is driven by the salaries of database administrators), how much is actually going into tasks that directly extract value from data or, more specifically, tasks that drive a business forward?
According to the leading analysts, database administrators (DBAs) spend the vast majority of their time performing mundane tasks that focus on keeping the ship afloat. The good ones may leverage the mighty power of the script to improve efficiency, but this is often done on an ad hoc basis. More frequently, the DBA has been reduced to following run books and escalating to support when all else fails. When you consider that these are your "data" people and the importance of understanding your data can mean a company's success or failure, it is surprising that little has been done to change this situation.
There are several types of DBAs with particular skill sets working in the data center. First, there are the DBAs who believe in hording knowledge and maintaining the mystery of data administration to ensure job security. The word "automation" does not equate to more free time for higher value work, rather "automation" means potential job loss. These people are typically nay-sayers and do very little to drive their organizations forward. Next, there are the DBAs who focus on the data and actually disdain the everyday world of operational DBA work. They are happier tuning, modeling, and developing conclusions based on valuable information stored in the database. To these DBAs, the database application is simply a tool to perform a task. The complexity of the tool is often perceived as a hindrance simply to overcome. Finally, there are the junior DBAs who are willing to learn, but do not have the skills to fully perform all DBA tasks - and the senior IT staff hardly has the time to properly train them.
How can you leverage these different types of DBAs, while cutting costs and improving the efficiency of your current staff? Unfortunately the complexities of database applications have created many more DBAs who are less focused on the data and concentrate on hording knowledge to ensure job security--and companies are paying their price.
As the amount of data under management and the standards by which that data is managed are exponentially increasing, companies have no choice but to alter the way they manage information. How should they react? What is the future of the DBA? There has to be a better way--a way to keep everyone employed and still allow businesses to come out on top. The answer is automation.
The DBA and Database Automation
While automation has spread widely across the data center, DBAs are still reluctant to apply these principles to the database. Companies need to apply a centralized, automated mechanism to manage their databases, such as GridApp Clarity, database automation software. With automation tools, senior DBAs are free to stop "pushing buttons." They can give the repetitive tasks to less skilled workers and focus more on strategy and revenue-generating practices. Meanwhile, mid-level workers can take on roles that were traditionally reserved for the IT industry experts. And, since automation eliminates manual, human-error business leaders can be assured that jobs are performed to their satisfaction.
Once the power of automation is realized, the implementation begins. The first step toward implementing a complete automation solution is creating an extensible and maintainable framework. This framework must be able to handle several system requirements, such as deploying an entity to a server, executing a script in the context of a database object, and removing the database object.
However, it is quite challenging to create a framework that is adaptable enough to manage complex databases and is easy to use. Interacting with a complex application, such as Oracle DBMS and Microsoft SQL Server, requires running several commands, each with unique arguments and each in a unique way to determine if the task was successful or not. Frequently, running these specific commands requires the execution of additional commands just to judge the results of a prior act. The framework must be able to deal with these interactions independent of the architecture (e.g. clustered, non-clustered) and environment (e.g. different operation systems, database versions, etc.).
Each organization also has customizations beyond the scope of managing the actual database application that must be integrated into the automation framework. These requirements can exceed the complexity of the core database automation. In many cases, preexisting work can be leveraged to ensure this logic is incorporated into the activities being automated.
It's not a good use of time or money to design or implement your own automation framework and scripts to manage the database. It's also unlikely that you are the only candidate for automation, so if you are considering automation, it's best to buy rather than build this aspect of your infrastructure. Some solutions have this framework and come with pre-built automation that understands and adapts to database versions, operating systems, and architecture. There is a constant stream of work required to update an automation framework based on new requirements. Beyond that, the actual code used to call out to the managed applications is fluid, due to the managed software updates.
Next Steps for IT Teams
Implementing an automation process for your DBAs to manage is a win-win situation for business decision makers. It allows the highly skilled DBAs to focus on revenue-generating strategy, while the less skilled employees maintain compliance metrics and best practices. If companies are able to adopt an automation strategy into the mix, they will be able to leverage the skills of their existing staff, without making cutbacks.
Given that the U.S. Department of Labor and Statistics has predicted that employment of DBAs is expected to grow "much faster than average," and is expected to outpace the growth of all other occupations, clearly demand for this type of skilled worker is very high and qualified candidates will demand highly-competitive salary and benefit packages. Why not make them as efficient as they can be? Now is the time for organizations to consider automation as an essential part of running an effective database environment.
Robert Gardos is CEO for GridApp.