How to become a Good DBA / Excellent DBA?

Qualities of Good DBA / Responsibilities of a DBA / Roles of Database Administrator

How to become a good DBA?

Do you want to become a good DBA?  It is a great career path and highly recommend.

If you have worked in computer support, programming, data analysis and managing computer information system are excellent candidate for database administration.

Mobile application developers, web developers, hardware programmers and application programmers often elect to specialize in database administration, database programming and SQL (Structured Query Language) queries.

  

Throughout this article we will use the term DBA to refer database administrator but also to data analysis, development and other database professions as well.

It is great to be a DBA for several reasons. You are normally in a small group of technical professionals. There may be a lot of developers, administrators, system support staff and other professionals in a company, there are usually few or even one DBA. You get to deal with the computing side of the organization as well as its business. The diversity of skills you need to have makes for a varied, attractive day.

How to become a DBA?

Before explaining, we should understand what that means. It is a difficult task to quantify a complete job description for a DBA since each job environment is a little different. In other jobs, role is often quite standard across companies. If you are a programmer or developer there are common tasks that you will perform at each and every job.

To become a good DBA, there are a few skills that are necessary or at least useful:

1-           The first requirement for a good DBA is attention to detail.

2-           DBA should take complete responsibility for all their decisions.

3-           DBA should ensure that data can only be accessed by authorized and relevant users.

4-           DBA should not snoop through the data for the sake of viewing it.

5-           If DBA views secret and confidential data, then the DBA should not share any confidential or sensitive information with any unauthorized users.

6-           If DBA finds out any misuse of an organization's data, then he/she should report immediately this behavior to the concerned authorities.

7-           The DBA should enforce licensing of all software agreements with vendors and also notify the concerned people in the organization if any breech is discovered.

8-           The DBAs should do their job to the best of his or her ability, implementing and developing best practices, to help ensure the smooth operations of the organization's databases.

9-           As you know that IT technology changes quickly, therefore it is also the responsibility of the DBA to actively keep up on all technical areas that directly affect their job.

10-       The DBA should conduct himself/herself, professionally in all relationships with the people he/she deal with on a daily basis, including co-workers, vendors, managers, and their internal customers.

11-       DBA should avoid any sort of favoritism and discrimination.

12-       If a DBA makes a mistake, and all DBAs make a mistake at one time or another, the mistake should be fixed as soon as possible, and should inform everyone who can be negatively affected by the mistake as soon as possible.

13-       DBA should prevent data corruption from any applications, hardware, and as well as people.

14-       DBA should provide high data availability according to organization's policy.

15-       The most important task is to develop a disaster recovery plan to minimize unexpected downtime.

Before making an important decision, the DBA should keep cool and should not take any rash action that could potentially hurt his/her career. Talk over the issue with people you trust in order to get their important input and feedback. Only take action once you have clearly considered the consequences of your choices and have evidences.

To conclude, guy having no IT background at all then DBA is not an entry level place. A good DBA is a jack-of-all and should possess in depth technical expertise. The DBA needs to interact with many different software and hardware components to ensure that database programs have efficient, accurate access to the organization's data.

A DBA with no experience is not likely to become a successful DBA. Instead, you should get a job as mobile applications developer, application developer or desktops application developer; learn database development skills, SQL queries, and then work to transfer into the database administration. The other potential gateway jobs to pursue before DBA include system administration (Linux or Windows), technical support and help desk technician. After getting some experience in any of these roles transferring into the database administration is achievable.

A good DBA should take every opportunity available to learn about database administration, management, and IT. Reading the latest information in industry books, research papers, journals and participating and attending in local user crowd, and sharing your practices with others are all good tactics to become a DBA.