The Ratio

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The Ratio

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Gary Varga SSC Guru Points: 82166 More actions · Answer 1

dogramone (10/6/2013)
The last place I worked for that had in house development and hosting was about 1 to 8. It was a strange mix as one system had two developers and one DBA, the other had two DBAs and about 30 developers. But DBA definition is critical in this one.
We had three people who were called DBAs and had DBA in their title but did no monitoring, no tuning, had no backup responsibility. All they did was some TSQL to collect data or fix TSQL application bugs. It drove me nuts as a former DBA and now BA/PM as their code was all spaghetti, did not know how to tune (just add an index!) and I couldn't even get them to do code formatting for readability. But these guys had been around for 15 or more years so all I could tell management is they are in job protection mode. After them making system changes that made everything crawl after adding several new indices that weren't being used (apart from where they added index hints) and one column that had around 15 indices on it I finally got any *new* code they were deploying over to the DBAs I trusted to tweak, tune and standardise.

They are not DBAs...they are bad developers giving everyone a bad name!!!

Gaz

-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!

David.Poole SSC Guru Points: 75905 More actions · Answer 2

Jeff Moden (10/5/2013)
Heh... you have to trust me on this... You DON'T actually want them to do their own backups. 😉

Backups fine, restores...not so much

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John Mitchell-245523 SSC Guru Points: 148809 More actions · Answer 3

David.Poole (10/7/2013)
Jeff Moden (10/5/2013)
Heh... you have to trust me on this... You DON'T actually want them to do their own backups. 😉
Backups fine, restores...not so much

I don't mind what they do on their own development servers - happy for them to make their own mistakes!

John

below86 SSChampion Points: 11514 More actions · Answer 4

We have one DBA, about 16 developers, and about 10 what I call 'power users'. These 'power' users usually write small queries to get some detail level data from our warehouse. We have our production warehouse, and a 'prod2' copy of that warehouse that we let these 'power' users loose against. in the past they ran against our production warehouse and brought it to it's knees with their code.

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we travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us
Don't fear failure, fear regret.

Eric JOATMON SSC Enthusiast Points: 176 More actions · Answer 5

We have about 5 developers to each DBA, not counting managers. The DBAs do development and production support for SQL Server, Sybase ASE, ORACLE, and DB2.

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1003894 More actions · Answer 6

John Mitchell-245523 (10/7/2013)
David.Poole (10/7/2013)
Jeff Moden (10/5/2013)
Heh... you have to trust me on this... You DON'T actually want them to do their own backups. 😉
Backups fine, restores...not so much
I don't mind what they do on their own development servers - happy for them to make their own mistakes!
John

The problem is they don't know how to fix what they blow up and because they tend to hoard backups, they can do a whole lot of damage that I'd rather not have to take the time to fix.

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

webrunner SSC-Dedicated Points: 31728 More actions · Answer 7

Wow, that is odd. My ratio is 1:10, just like Steve said in the editorial.

- webrunner

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A SQL query walks into a bar and sees two tables. He walks up to them and asks, "Can I join you?"
Ref.: http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2009/02/sql-joke.html

TomThomson SSC Guru Points: 104773 More actions · Answer 8

The ratio is going to depend enormously on what needs doing.

If the shop is doing a little bit of application development but handling hundereds of production servers with big databases and serious availability and disaster recovery requirements, it needs more DBAs than developers.

On the other hand, if it's doing a fair bit of development (which includes schema design) and only has a couple of dozen small to medium production servers to support it ought not to need any DBAs at all, the developers should have automated just about all the things that a production DBA would do.

I guess the ratio should vary from all DBAs and no developers to no DBAs and all developers, depending on what's being done, so the idea that there is some single correct or best ratio is not one I tend to believe in.

Anyway, I have a theory that good database developers can easily pass for DBAs, while good development DBAs can easily pass for developers. And I think the sort of overspecialisatin that produces developers (except very young ones who haven't yet got around to it) who haven't learnt to do database stuff or DBAs (again except very young and inexperienced ones) who can administer and organis recoverability and high availability haven't learnt to develop a schema or high performance sets of queries is a bad thing. So the concept of a ratio of DBAs to developers is a bit meaninglss if you are talking about what I think of as competent not overspecialised people.

Tom

Chord77 Say Hey Kid Points: 663 More actions · Answer 9

4 (Soon to be 5) DBA's, to about 15-17 Developers.

Us DBA's also do all of the SQL Development as well (tables, stored procedures and even OData Web Services)