Automate the un-automatable in Database Administration

Database Administration

Databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, are some of the most complicated and critical parts of an enterprise stack.

In recent surveys, DBAs are currently in the 5 top skills in demand and commend some of the highest salaries in our industry.

Despite this, enterprises employ DBAs where up to 80% of their work is performing manual day to day administration tasks like provisioning, patching, configuration and tuning.

Therefore, enterprise and mid-market organisations are only really capitalising on 20% of the top dollar they pay for when hiring a DBA.

DBA's are not stupid

They realise this and capitalise on this in the marketplace. More and more are turning to the contract market and keep their skills bang up to date with the latest trends. Some do it for the money – others do it because they’re not challenged in the day to day admin work assigned to them.

This is bad, bad news for all those poor, needy Enterprises that just want their Databases maintained! All they have to offer their DBA gurus is 20% of the time working on cool stuff, and 80% doing daily grind. No wonder the average tenure for a permanent DBA is only 18 months.

A clear answer would be to let your internal DBAs work on the cool stuff you’d usually get contractors in to do. Get them to plan next years’ Database Architecture, optimise the Test/Dev environments and ensure the enterprise is ready for the next big application release.

If your highly paid DBA is doing 80% interesting work and 20% overseeing a DBA managed service such as dsp to keep the lights on, then job interest will stay high and you’ll mitigate the need to bring in costly contractors.