Oracle OpenWorld Unconference Session

Session Title :The Oracle DBA... A dying breed?
Presenter: Tim Hall
Time : 2 PM
Date : Thursday
Location : Moscone West 3rd Floor Overlooks
Room: Overlook II

For the first time ever at Oracle OpenWorld (or any other major enterprise software industry conference), attendees will have the opportunity to directly participate by presenting their own session or workshop on a topic they're passionate about, in an informal, interactive setting.

Session Description:
Over the years Oracle has consistently improved the self tuning functionality and general usability of the database to the point where some would say the conventional role of a DBA no longer exists.

In this session the participants will discuss what it means to be a DBA in the current climate. The types of topics to be discussed include:

• What does the term DBA mean to you?
• What additional skills are required to make a good DBA these days (sys admin, development, project management)?
• What work do you now expect developers to do, that in the past you would have considered DBA work?
• Is it vital for an Oracle DBA to be an Oracle Apps DBA also?
• Should an Oracle DBA have to worry about application servers or the infrastructure as a whole?
• What Oracle features have made being a DBA easier/harder?
• What features would you like added to Oracle to make your job easier?

Presenter:
Tim Hall is an Oracle Certified Professional DBA (7, 8, 8i, 9i, 10g), Oracle ACE Director and was chosen as Oracle ACE of the Year 2006 by Oracle Magazine Editors Choice Awards. He has been involved in DBA, design and development work with Oracle databases since graduating from university in 1994 with a PhD in Molecular Genetics.

He has gained a wide knowledge of the Oracle software stack and has worked as a consultant for several multi-national companies on projects ranging from real-time control systems to OLTP web applications. Since 2000 he has published over 300 articles on his website (www.oracle-base.com) covering a wide range of Oracle features.

Session notes

15-20 people attending with an even split between DBAs and developers.

The purpose of the session was to discuss what we as a group think the DBA role is, and whether it has a future.

Where relevant I'll use a 5 star rating against the bullet points to give an indication of the feeling of the audience.

Rating	Meaning
*	Disagree. Not important at all.
**	Of minor importance.
***	Of medium importance.
****	Agree. Quite important.
*****	Agree strongly. Very important.
~	Added after discussion, so not unrated.

Note. Please keep in mind these were the opinions of the people present, not a definitive statement that's cast in stone.


What does the term DBA mean to you? How do you think you are regarded?

• Jack of all trades
• Closet dictator
• Database guru
• Developer with extra skills
• System administrator with extra skillls

This slide was really an ice-breaker, just to get the ball rolling. It wasn't really meant to provide any insight. The interesting point coming out of this was most DBAs felt they had a good working relationship with the development teams. This feeling was mirrored by the developers present. Hopefully, this means the bad old days of the big-bad-DBA are gone.


What additional skills are required to make a good DBA these days?

• System administration (***)
• Networking skills (***)
• Development skills (****)
• Business analysis and design (***)
• Project management, management, or leadership skills (*****)
• Communication skills (***)

It was generally agreed that a DBA requires quite a wide variety of skills these days. Gone are the days when you could put on your blinkers and focus on a single skill set. Instead, the DBA needs to bridge the gap between several functional areas of the team. Hopefully acting as an enabler.



It seemed generally accepted that in a development environment, tasks such as table and index creation were something developers were expected to do, with the DBA taking an overseeing role. In fact, most people thought a development environment should be very open for developers. The change management process from development, through test, and finally to production was still a DBA role.

Performance tuning moved more into the DBA territory, but developers were still expected to take part in this. Developer access to information seemed the biggest issue here. Access to SQL trace files, Statspack, AWR and ADDM seemed to be a limiting factor here. Personally, I've written utilities to allow developer access to these features, but for some the locked-down nature of there systems meant the DBA was necessary to provide the information. There was also some concern that the complexity of the reports was confusing and off putting to developers, meaning the ball was left firmly in the DBA's court.


What Oracle features have made being a DBA easier/harder?

• Automatic Storage Manager (ASM) (*****)
  
• Enterprise Manager (***)
  
• RMAN (*****)
  
• Statspack, AWR, ADDM (***)
  
• Automatic memory management, in its varous forms since 9i (****)
  
• Logminer (**)
  
• Flashback (**)
  
• Automatic Segment Space Management (***)
• Active Session History (ASH) (**)
• Automatic Undo Management (~)
• Automatic CBO Statistics Gathering (~)

The outright winners here were ASM and RMAN. The majority of the attendees used RMAN for backups. The interesting thing for me was the take-up of ASM. All the people using it said it made provisioning of storage much more simple. In all cases, these people were also involved in provisioning storage prior to ASM, so it was not a new job for them, but was simplified greatly thanks to ASM.

We agreed the web-based Enterprise Manager had lots of great functionality, but with a couple of exceptions, most thought the web interface was "clunky", requiring too many clicks and page refreshes to get the job done.

Generally, the take-up of new features was high. Like myself, most used the new features unless they resulted in a negative results, rather than assuming the worst and sticking to the old ways. This was quite interesting to me as I thought most people would be more reserved in this respect.


What features would you like added to Oracle to make your job easier?

• CREATE [WHEN MISSING]...
• DROP [WHEN PRESENT]...
• BOOLEAN datatype for use in tables.
• Native string aggregation functions.

Most people weren't looking for a killer new feature, just incremental improvements.

I was planning to ask the following two questions also:


Unfortunately, the presentation was cut short at this point because we had used up the whole of the hour slot.


Conclusion

The Oracle DBA isn't a dying breed... It's just changing over time... :)