• blandry (12/16/2009)


    I hate to throw a whine at you, but your post presumes that all over the world a DBA can be measured to have the same basic skills from one person to the next. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is NO standard (still!) for what a DBA is, and in my career I have rarely seen any two DBA's with matched skills and depth in them. I've worked with folks who can handle SQL in their sleep, and also worked with "DBA's" who don't know was SSIS is, or who were anointed "DBA" because they could do a backup.

    Hence, to make a statement like: "It is the DBA who is responsible for making sure that a deployment does not have any ill effect..." presumes that the DBA has the skills to anticipate and know these ill effects, and that is just completely a fantasy by my experience.

    I think your initiating question would serve us all better if it were a statement of what a DBA should know. I would rather interview a potential DBA and ask "What is the standard for SQL Server Data Deployments?" and get an intelligent, somewhat standard answer, than to toss such a question into the air when we have no solid guidelines as to what makes a DBA.

    While I agree that there is no standard definition of a DBA; I do disagree that Rodney presumes such. But rather, he has defined a typical role of a DBA as "gatekeeper".

    It is your very point that a DBA can possess any range of skills and experiences that deployment processes and procedures be well tested and mature. A staging environment (identical to production) to which the DBA can test the deployment process, the developer to validate changes, and the end-user to do acceptance testing is a critical component of a mature model.

    In this way, the ability to anticipate or know the ill affects has little consequence as it will be learned in staging without affecting production. This is of course speaking narrowly of the deployment and without consideration of the experience a DBA needs to identify areas of improvement in a database's design. In that respect--it is often a collaboration with the developers.

    John D