What If Your DBA Could Do More?

The “old” all-purpose DBA job description included installation, configuration, maintenance, and troubleshooting, tasks which are monotonous and time-consuming. With cloud computing and managed services, however, the new “post-managed services” DBA takes on new roles in-house.

A newly-released white paper from Datavail, DBA Superpowers Unleashed: How Managed Services Empower Your Team, discusses the potential of implementing long-term managed services to elevate the DBA’s role in your organization, altering and ultimately maximizing their job duties. It shows how your company could benefit from restructuring your DBA’s strategic role.

Modernizing your DBA’s role means they become even more valuable to your organization. They could be performing beyond their traditional job description and making themselves indispensable to the overall workflow of your company.

In this blog post, we discuss the advantages of adding value to the role of your on-staff DBAs by expanding beyond the outlined traditional tasks. Implementing managed services for database administration could help your company achieve spectacular results.

Installing, Configuring, Troubleshooting

Historically, this trifecta of duties was on top of every on-staff DBA’s job description. Performing these monotonous, time-consuming tasks day in and day out can restrict a DBA’s capacity, resulting in feelings of frustration – eventually potentially leading to high turnover.

Overworked and Underused?

To maintain a company database that handles a massive amount of data, DBAs perform a lot of technical, hands-on, repetitive work. Though the process is indispensable, some required tasks are time-consuming and involve working off hours. Here’s a list of six of the most demanding tasks that require DBAs to be on call and on the ball:

1. Database Security Management

As one of the main responsibilities, database security management mainly involves monitoring and administering DBMS security, including these very important tasks:

• Creation and removal of users and accounts
• Administering quotas
• Performing security checks
• Auditing

2. Database Monitoring

To identify and remove bottlenecks, DBAs must monitor system performance 24×7 as failures can occur at any time. That means being available on weekends, holidays, and at any hour of the day or night.

3. Performance Tuning

Health checks and performance tuning, though given high priority, could unfortunately fall by the wayside because of all the other routine demands placed on a DBA. Reactionary tuning replaces preventative tuning, which isn’t ideal, because preventing rather than fixing outages would keep the database healthy and running smoothly.

4. Database Backup and Recovery

One of the key roles of the DBA is protecting data in a database system. DBAs need to develop effective backup and recovery strategies and be able to implement them in order to ensure data security.

Protecting a database is essential to maintaining data integrity, but developing and testing effective backup and recovery strategies is time-consuming.

5. Database Upgrades

Depending on the number of databases the DBA is managing, upgrades could be performed as often as once per week or as little as once every six months. It’s a complex, lengthy, demanding task regardless of the schedule.

6. Troubleshooting and Database Maintenance

The DBA is tasked with finding and eliminating problems within the database quickly and with no loss of data. The stakes are high with system failure on the line. It’s a lot to ask for, especially if you consider scheduling and implementing routine DBMS maintenance as part of the troubleshooting process because it must be done off-hours to minimize the disruption to the user community.

The “post-managed services” model

Wouldn’t you rather have your highly-paid DBAs engaged in business-building activities that boost the bottom line? What if most of these routine tasks could be delegated to someone else, freeing your DBA from working long hours on the same old workload, and instead using his or her superpowers to build and streamline IT systems and processes?

Companies that take advantage of managed services are doing themselves and their DBAs a favor by “liberating” them to focus on more constructive, value-add tasks. Such tasks include data safeguarding, carrying out data analysis, making recommendations, and offering professional advice to clients on cloud services.

A DBA’s role can be expanded in myriad ways with the help of managed services. Download our white paper, DBA Superpowers Unleashed: How Managed Services Empower Your Team to read about what your DBA could be doing to maximize ROI, such as:

1. Working closely with system administrators to optimize cloud DBMS performance
2. Keeping up with cloud technology trends, helping choose cloud services
3. Training on new technologies and applications
4. Developing training courses and guides for the user community on new system usage and best practices
5. Performing data analysis and making storage recommendations

 
To learn more about how modern DBAs can expand their role and how the Datavail managed services model can work for you, contact Datavail today. Datavail is a specialized IT services company focused on Data Management with solutions in BI/DW, analytics, database administration, custom application development, and enterprise applications. We provide both professional and managed services delivered via our global delivery model, focused on Microsoft, Oracle and other leading technologies.