I enjoyed Charles’ post on I Love Postgres, especially since TheServerSide.com runs on Postgres.
We are big fans of EXPLAIN, however we do not have a fulltime DBA. Maybe it is just my perspective, but the DBA role seems to have dwindled slightly in the companies that I have been at. Large companies definitely still have them, but they seem to ask more of fewer of them. Small companies try hard to get by without them, and ask developers / sysadmins to wear that hat.
Maybe we aren’t paying as much attention to the database as we should be as you can “get by” without (in a passive way… until something breaks).
I have worked with some amazing DBAs in the past, and know what they bring to the table. They can do fantastic things, which go far beyond tweaking performance. Some of the data designs I have seen in the past were so elegant I really didn’t want to screw them up with my object model ;)
Now, I raise my glass, to the wizard DBA.
June 23rd, 2004 at 1:16 pm
Absolutely!! Our DBA team at Notiva does amazing things, even with the developers screwing things up now and again :-)