Database Insurance

It's difficult having an IT shop these days. You have to manage different types of people along with different priorities from your wide-ranging customer bases. And as an IT director, you want to get the biggest bang for your buck. So you have devs and it's best to have them actively writing code as much as possible. That's how you get your money out of them. And if you have some really expensive sr.-level devs,

It's difficult having an IT shop these days. You have to manage different types of people along with different priorities from your wide-ranging customer bases. And as an IT director, you want to get the biggest bang for your buck. So you have devs and it's best to have them actively writing code as much as possible. That's how you get your money out of them. And if you have some really expensive sr.-level devs, you want them working on sr.-level dev stuff at all times. You don't want to pay $100K+ for a dev to have him write basic HTML pages.

We had the same thing in kitchens back when I was a chef. If you've got a worldclass chef that you're paying a lot of money, you want him standing there doing what only he can do as much as possible. That is afterall, what makes it worth having him there. So you don't want him running to the walk-in for his own supplies or whipping his own cream. You have apprentices for that.

The situation is different with DBAs though. DBAs are more of an insurance policy. Sure, they're there to guide your data efforts, but they're mainly there in case of a serious disaster. A lot of IT directors get upset when their DBAs aren't completely busy at all times. Afterall, good DBAs are expensive so you want them sitting there doing whatever it is that they do as much as possible. However, that just isn't so. You don't want your DBAs so busy that they don't have time to fully monitor your systems. And you don't want them so busy that 10 projects fall behind because there's a disaster and they have to be pulled onto that instead.

DBAs are just different from devs. A dev will never be called into action with a downed server. Nor will he get a call in the middle of the night that something's running too slowly. So you can work your devs 100% of the time while they're at the office. But DBAs actually have more downtime than you'd expect. Sure, they're busy, even busy as hell sometimes, but not 100% of every day.

Again, DBAs are an insurance policy. You definitely want them around when something happens to your data. However, be mindful of the type of DBA you have in your shop. If you want someone to work on all the projects and do lots of coding, etc, then you want a database dev, not a DBA. DBAs are systems folk. They make sure things run smoothly. So ideally, they shouldn't be attached to any projects, or at least very few.

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