Monday, December 31, 2007

What is a Production DBA?

I often hear recruiters say that they are having a hard time to find a MySQL production DBA. Well, since MySQL is not yet that mature as compared to Oracle, most DBAs are therefore relatively unseasoned.

And most DBA are not into production work yet. So, what are the experience / characteristics of a production DBA? Here are my two cents.

1. Manages 20-30 databases which are 25-30 GB in size.
2. Knows what to do when he is on-call.
3. Understands the inner workings of MySQL. For example, does he know what mysqldump actually do aside from backing up the data? How will it perform with a 25 GB data?
4. Based on the 1st criteria, the DBA will be careful in writing his queries. For example, he knows that select * from a table is query that should be banned from MySQL.
5. Very handy with scripting languages which could be PERL, Shell, etc. If the DBA has to update the configuration of 30 databases, he cannot do this manually and therefore he has to rely on his scripting skills to be able to whip a quick script to do the work.

1 comment:

Anand Rockzz said...

Makes Sense. Would've helped me more if you had talked about how and where to gain all these knowledge for a beginner. For Example, I'm a Java developer struggling to build and host a simple website. But Need some insight on how to sent my mySQL (with just 5 simple tables in 1 database) for production.