The James Bond of Database Administration

“Defending our systems needs to be as sexy as attacking others. There’s really only one solution: Bond.”

That is what ‘The Guardian’ wrote recently in an article entitled “The Man with the Golden Mouse: why data security needs a James Bond“.

Attending the annual Oracle ACE Director Briefing at Oracle HQ awoke up an interesting debate on the following question: What will happen in the near future with the DBA profession? Who is now the James Bond of Database Administration?

According to TechTarget, big data tools are changing data architectures in many companies. The effect on the skill sets required by database administrators may be moderate, but some new IT tricks are likely to be needed. GoldenGate is the new Streams, Exadata is the new RAC, Sharding the new Partitioning, Big Data is the new data (Texas is an exception), you name it…

Having the privilege to work throughout the years with some of the best database experts in the world has, for all it matters, proved to me that Double-O-Sevens are in fact more like Double-O-six-hundreds. Meaning that there are 100s of DBAs that qualify with no hesitation whatsoever as the James Bonds of Database Administration. I have learned so much from my ex Nokia colleagues, from my current Enkitec and Accenture colleagues. Not to mention friends from companies like eDBA, Pythian, Miracle, etc.

A DBA needs to have so many skills. Look for instance at Craig S. Mullins’ suggested 17 skills required of a DBA. Kyle Hunter’s article The evolution of the DBA and the Data Architect is clearly pointing to the emerging skillsets in the Data Revolution.

In the IT business, and in database administration in particular, it is not that important how well you know the old stuff, it is more important how fast you can learn the new things. Here are some of the tools that help every modern Oracle DBA:

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c
ORAchk
Metalink/MOS
Developer Tools
Oracle Application Express (APEX)
SQL Developer
Oracle JDeveloper
SQL Developer Data Modeler
And last but not least SQL*Plus®

These additional Metalink tools might be often of great help:

Diagnostic Tools Catalog – Note ID 559339.1
OS Watcher (Support Tool) – Note 301137.1
LTOM (Support Tool) – Note 352363.1
HANGFG (Support Tool) – Note 362094.1
SQLT (Support Tool) – Note 215187.1
PLSQL Profiler (Support Script) – Note 243755.1
MSRDT for the Oracle Lite Repository – Note 458350.1
Trace Analyzer TRCANLZR – Note 224270.1
ORA-600/ORA-7445 Error Look-up Tool – Note 153788.1
Statspack (causing more problems than help in 12c)

The Man with the Golden Mouse is the James Bond of Database Administration. The best DBA tools are still knowledge and experience.