Why a Developer DBA adds value to the organization

Recently have considered the whole discussion surrounding the DBA and Developer relationship.

Typically most IT shops have a developer team that manages the development and test environments and a senior level DBA to focus primary on production mission critical database and applications. However, as the reality sets in a firm's development arean can be extremely critical if it ever goes down and it does because development and test systems tend to be more flakey and less stable than production as changes are made on a frequent basis, tables and schema changes occur on the fly and if the development application and database is not available then the developers cannot get any work done which greatly upsets the status quo of things.

A good discussion of the purpose for a development DBA can be found here

http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-administration/what-use-is-a-development-dba/

Thai beer, writing and learning

Its been a crazy 4 weeks with new work on database technologies, writing a book on database migrations to Oracle 10g, and meeting new colleagues and associates.

While not a big consumer of alcoholic beverages, I can appreciate the benefit of washing down spicy foods with Thai beer. Of course, one of my new colleagues has the amazing talent of not only smoking like a chimney (8 packs of cigarettes a day!) but can eat 2 sushi combination dinners and drink between 3-8 beers at one sitting!! I am amazed at how some folks have god-like genetics and can do such feats of hard living.

I have been consumed with so many things lately between work, travel, and professional development that its a good busy schedule.