• I've been through the "what is a DBA?" question many times in my career. Personally I tend to think of a DBA as the production DBA, who's responsibility is the design, setup, and maintenance of the more physical part of a DBMS, that being the actual SQL Server program, filegroups and disk layouts, capacity planning, backups and maintenance plans, and system security.

    I'd consider a data analyst someone who works in data modeling, systems integration, and more logical aspects of the DBMS.

    Someone who's a programmer or developer would be a third role, focused on just the designing and implementing tables, views, trigers and stored procs. The problem is, a single person often to fill more than one of these roles, and those overlaps differ from company to company. Some split the data analyst role between the DBAs and developers. some give that role entirely to DBAs, some entirely to the developers. Occasionally I've seen a person need to be all 3 roles.