Saturday, April 14, 2007

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/

2 comments:

CG The Journey! said...

Hey Ben,

Maybe another layer to add..

1. Developer usually develops with functionality in mind.

2. DBA usually administers with two things in mind, a. Access to DB, b. Access to data from customers is ok.

3. Possible third layer, Performance and Tuning is a layer most forget..

Just my $0.2 worth..

skymaster said...

Hi Chris-

Good points, thanks for the tips and advice on developer and DBA relationship. It is very gray area in many organizations.