Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • The Ratio

    It seems we never have enough staff in many of our technology departments. I have worked in companies where I thought we had too many IT employees, but somehow it seemed my department was always short of resources.

    However one thing that I’ve seen almost universally is a larger number of developers than DBAs in most companies. That makes sense as I think there usually is more code to write than instances to administer, and I’ve usually found companies have to hire a few developers before they see the need for a DBA of any sort, whether production or development focused.  I’ve also found the relative levels of staffing have widely varied.

    This week I’m curious what ratios you’ve seen between these two jobs. I’d like an answer to this question, based on your experience:

    How many developers does a DBA support?

    I’m looking for the real ratios that you’ve experienced. In the places where I’ve developed code, or worked with developers I’ve typically seen about 1:10 DBAs to developers, but that number has varied. I’ve seen 1:5 and 1:20+, but in most cases it’s been near 1:10.

    Let us know this week and get a little market research that might help you convince your boss that you need a helper or two.

    Steve Jones

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    Today’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

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  • Networking at the PASS Summit: First timers

    The PASS Summit is just over a week away, and one again Andy Warren and I are hosting a networking dinner on Monday night. This is a free, informal event to help people get to know each other. Whether you are new to the community or have been to many events, you’re welcome to attend. We are targeting first timers, so if you’ve never been to the Summit, and don’t know what things you can do, if you don’t have other plans, come on by.

    We want to ensure that people are taking advantage of their time at the Summit, while encouraging them to do more than hang out with themselves or friends. Many of us have done that, but there are better things to do, like meet your colleagues.

    Andy and I will greet people and introduce some of you to others. Networking is easy, and this is a chance to meet some new people and make some contacts in the community. We’re providing a time and location, you just have to show up, and of course, pay for your own food and drinks. If you want to buy someone else a round, that’s a great way to make new contacts.

    Register and come if you are in town Monday night. There’s no charge, but we’d like to have an idea of how many of you will come by. It’s a Buffalo Wild Wings in Charlotte, from 6-9. The address is below:

    400 E Martin Luther King Jr Blvd
    Charlotte, NC 28202

    I don’t know how much I’ll get to talk to most of you, but I’d like to shake your hand and say hi.

  • Scripting

    One of the directions in which Red Gate Software is to build more tools and utilities that all of you can use for working in cloud environments. We aren’t ignoring the desktop tools like SQL Compare and Prompt (v6, yeah!) that you’ve come to appreciate and depend on, but we are investing in expanding these tools to work with a remote, services style architecture since there are plenty of companies looking at AWS, Azure, or other providers for a portion of their applications.

    I’ve been learning a bit more about the way cloud services work and one of the things that becomes important in an IaaS environment is scripting. The environment you get is a base install and if you need more software or processes to run when a new VM starts up, you need to script the various installations or configurations.

    There are some great scripting features for SQL Server, like Finebuild for installs and Powershell for most everything else. Scripting is a great way to accomplish tasks, but like most skills, it needs to be used in order to be efficient and practical for most tasks. I’ve struggled with this, and I’m sure many others feel the same way.

    However I am starting to think that Powershell might be the best investment in my future skills. The quicker I can write it and build scripts to accomplish tasks, the more I’ll be able to do over time as I build a library of commandlets and scripts. That’s if I remember to document them well so I can easily search for what I need.

  • Citizen Scientists

    The tremendous growth of computing power, especially in the form of mobile devices, means that more and more people can analyze data themselves, or have applications do it locally, reducing the need for large central systems to perform all the calculations. Indeed some of the value from Hadoop and other cluster computing systems comes from using lots of small, relatively powerful systems to do more work than one single computer could.
    However we can not only analyze, but also gather data. There is a rise in the citizen scientist, in which individuals can help scientists by gathering data and sharing it with others. This can reduce the costs of gathering data, but more importantly, gather much more, and varied, data than might otherwise be possible. There are a number of projects available if you’re an amateur scientist that wants to join in.
    Most of us are data professionals and might be interested in working with more data. Perhaps we ant a set for demo purposes, but perhaps we want to work on a project that interests us and could use our technical talents. Many of the projects out there make their data available, and you should consider using such a set if it strikes your fancy.
    More importantly, I would hope that more people would analyze the raw data and look to verify, or dispute, the conclusions of the project owners. As data professionals, we can help people learn how they can analyze and manipulate data better with the tools we have available.  With more transparency, we can have healthier debates on the causes, the effects, and even the potential future implications of how to build a better world in the future.
    Steve Jones

    Video and Audio versions

    Today’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

    Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.
    Steve Jones Windows Media Video ( 17.5MB) feed

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    Feeds are available at iTunes and Mevio

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