An Essential DBA Skill (Part II)
Click here for Part I of this article.
Searching for information online is an essential DBA skill. The Internet is a treasure trove of information that can help you in solving a problem. For example, user groups such as the Northern California Oracle Users Group (NoCOUG) have made vast collections of electronic presentations and white papers available on their web pages. Often a simple Google search will bring up an answer, but many specialized resources also are available.
The highest quality resource is of course the online Oracle documentation. Click the View Library link of any documentation set to get to the corresponding search page. Documentation for older versions of Oracle software going back to Oracle 7 is available here. Download the documentation you need to your desktop or laptop so you can browse the documentation while offline. Downloading the documentation to your computer is particularly advisable if you prefer the PDF versions. Because of the documents’ large size, it is more efficient to browse through them while offline.
You also can ask questions on the Oracle forums. Many Oracle experts donate a lot of time answering questions posted here.
The Oracle Technology Network (OTN) is an Oracle-sponsored site filled with useful resources including articles, sample code, and tutorials. It also contains links to the Oracle documentation and Oracle forums.
Oracle author Tom Kyte has been answering Oracle questions for many years on his web site Ask Tom. He’ll answer your question if he hasn’t already answered a similar question before and if the answer would be of wide interest.
Another good place to ask questions is the Usenet newsgroup comp.databases.oracle.server. Many Oracle experts donate a lot of time answering questions posted here. Most Internet service providers provide access to newsgroups, but you can also use a Google account to ask questions.
If you’ve exhausted other alternatives, consider asking your question to the subscribers of the Oracle-L mailing list. To subscribe or unsubscribe, send an e-mail message to oracle-l-requests@freelists.org with the word subscribe or unsubscribe in the subject line.
You can search the Oracle knowledge base (MetaLink) and obtain technical support from Oracle Support if you are paying annual support fees to Oracle and have a valid Customer Support Identifier (CSI). The support fees are typically 22 percent of the cost of your Oracle licenses. If you choose to forgo Oracle support, you will not be entitled to any patches (fixes for software bugs) or upgrades. If you cannot find the answer in the Oracle knowledge base, you can create a service request. The priority of the service request and the corresponding service-level commitment depend on the impact to your organization. For instance, a production outage is classified as Severity 1 and is given the highest level of attention.
Excerpted from Beginning Oracle Database 11g Administration
An Essential DBA Skill (Part I)
I have attended many interviews for Oracle DBA positions in my career and, with rare exceptions, always found that the interviewers set great store on knowledge of Oracle syntax. A big problem is that the typical interviewer usually only asks questions about those Oracle features that he or she uses on the job and is most familiar with. Any candidate who has not used those Oracle features is then automatically eliminated. In an interview published in the journal of the Northern California Oracle Users Group (NoCOUG), I asked Jeremiah Wilton the following question:
My daughter’s piano teacher likes to say that practice makes permanent, not perfect. Just because I’ve been a database administrator a long time doesn’t qualify me as a “senior” database administrator—or does it? Who is a “senior” database administrator? Do I need a college degree? Do I need to be a “syntax junkie?” Do I really need experience with Oracle Streams or ASM to claim the title?
In his reply, Jeremiah suggested that anybody with a few years of experience under their belt was entitled to call themselves a senior DBA, but he did not value years of experience and knowledge of Oracle syntax very much:
To me, senior means that you have used a lot of Oracle’s features, solved a lot of problems, and experienced a variety of production situations. Do these qualities necessarily mean that I will want to hire you? No. Of far greater importance than seniority is a DBA’s ability to solve problems in a deductive and logical manner, to synthesize creative solutions to problems, and to forge positive and constructive business relationships with colleagues and clients. For years at Amazon, we simply tried to hire extraordinarily smart people with a strong interest in working with Oracle and others. Some of Amazon’s most senior DBAs started with little or no Oracle experience. I believe that the focus on experience in specific technologies and seniority causes employers to pay more and get less than they could when filling DBA positions.
When a DBA candidate is interviewed at Database Specialists, the focus is on the candidate’s analytical and communication skills. The candidate is first given an extract from the Oracle alert log and asked to write a report discussing the Oracle errors listed in the extract. There is no expectation that the candidate has had previous experience with those errors, and the candidate is welcome to research the answers online; this mimics the approach used by real database administrators in real life.
The second exercise mimics a common event in the life of a database administrator—a critical problem that has high visibility and requires a number of participants. The candidate is given access to a lab system owned by Database Specialists and is asked to join a telephonic conference. To prepare for the exercise, the candidate is directed to a white paper—available on the Database Specialists web site—that discusses the problem-solving approaches that would be useful during the exercise. Participating on the conference call are members of the Database Specialists team, one of whom represents the customer while the rest represent other IT personnel such as system administrators. The customer describes the problem, and the candidate is expected to ask questions, diagnose, and solve the problem with the help of the other participants on the call. The problem is actually simulated in a lab database, and the candidate is expected to check the database and communicate the findings. The candidate is welcome to research the problem online, since there is no expectation that he or she has any experience with the specific problem that is being simulated.
Searching for information online is an essential DBA skill. Here is a little challenge to test your searching skills. I received the following email message from a correspondent:
From: [name withheld]
To: Iggy Hotmail
Sent: Wednesday, December 27, 2006 6:21 AM
Subject: query[name withheld] wants to know the author of this verse
“Small minds inquire, belongs this man
To mine own creed or kith or clan?
But larger hearted men embrace
As brothers, all the human race.”
Who is the author of the above verse, what is the correct text, and what is the larger context? The first correct answer will receive a copy of my book.
Click here for Part II of this article.
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