Database administration course is not sufficient for handling critical database environment. There is a lot of other skill sets required. The article explains which another skill set is needed to be good DBA and why those are required. Always fresher DBA complains that they are not getting a good job. This is maybe one of reason.
Database Administration courseware doesn’t fulfill all requirements to be good Database Administrator. It covers only Database level basics only. When we are talking about the live environment, DBA faces every time new challenge and only database administration skill set is not sufficient to resolve the issues.
Database administration course is covering base and pioneer steps for administrating and managing database laws like DBMS courseware. What DBMS courseware provides only basic rule of Database Management System. It is theoretical rules. How can we apply those things in realistic live scenario that depends on situation and issues?
During database administration course we learn about creating a database, dropping a database, creating a tablespace, adding space in existing tablespace, dropping the tablespace, creating a schema, securing schema etc. But courseware never teaches upgrading a database, migration database, and connectivity to another DBMS, advance features, advance security, system administration, hardware configuration, network concepts. In live database administration, we should need to consider any of above task or more than one task.
When we are affecting from network problem and the end user doesn’t get the connection of database or gets a connection but very slowly then what we should need to checks. If we have some knowledge of networking concepts then we can investigate the root cause of slow connection. Otherwise, we never find out the root cause of a problem and always check database side connectivity.
Suppose we are going to install Oracle software on the new server and during installation process, we are encountering with unknown errors. If we don’t know how to trace those errors from operating system side then the operation fails. And we never know exact problem of failure. The same thing also applies when paging/swapping is occurring and without checking it we try to checks from database side for tuning database.
We should need to understand application flow. Fully application understanding doesn’t require but some part of application process. Without knowing application process flows how can we CACHE tables and PL/SQL procedures in real memory? If it can then there is very less chance to get success.
It is happening the same way when we are not knowing storage principles and going to create the new database on a server. Actually, we don’t know which file system is locating in Storage Area Network and which file system is locating locally. Without knowing those basics if we install Oracle and create a new database there are more chances to get trouble after creation.
One of my clients got a problem with Oracle because after starting the database, system resources fully occupied and got 100% CPU usage. An end user could not able to work because the whole system stuck. There were lots of DBA consultants visited client site for resolving an issue. Unfortunately, nobody was able to judge and analysis of root cause. A lot of DBA consultants tried to expand SGA and tuned some parameters to a database. But nobody got success to get rid of the issue. When I visited client site, I saw file system was FAT32 and size of the system data file were more than 4 GB. I recreated database with smaller datafiles (less than 3 GB) and the problem never happens again. This is not single scenario there are other scenarios are happening when I need some extra knowledge apart from Database Administration.
Above points are only partial there are lots of more. In short, we can say that database administration course doesn’t fulfill all requirements to be good database administrator. To be a good database administrator we should need more than courses. Database Administration is not an easy task, it is the very tough task because it requires more than DBA skill sets.
