what does a dba really do
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What does a DBA really doin ITIL terms ?
A good DBA may relax and put his legs on the table.These words a senior (in age as well as in experience)
DBA used to say while he was trying to teach me the basics of administrating databases. He was trying to say
that organizing your work and preparing yourself for future catastrophes is the most important part of the job.Only then you are confident to face the surprises Oracle software and the organisation where you work for com
up with.
But as time passes by I disagree with this attitude. In my opinion a good DBA has always work to do. But its
not always easy to convince your manager you are busy as hell. What ARE you doing all day long, or moreove
what meaningful pro-active contributions you possibly can do for your company to keep the business online?And how can you make it visible to your manager. Im convinced that in most organisations the attitude towar
DBAs is quite respectfull, but that was and is not always the case and this writing is for those who continuous
struggle with the aspects a DBA is doing or is supposed to do.
In this post Ill try to summarize the deliverables for a DBA as a kind of checklist. Thought about it what base
choose for this kind of list. Had the choice for methods as ITIL, ASL (Application Services Library) ISM(Integrated Service Management), COBIT ( Control Objectives for Information and related Technology) and
more. Decided to keep it simple, using a lot of ITIL (v2, cause Im lost with v3):
Service Support
Incident Management Configuration Management Problem Management Change Management Release Management
Service Delivery
Continuity Management Availability Management
Service Level Management Capacity Management Financial Management
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In drawing, from service-desk perspective:
Lets take a glance at Service Support:
Incidentmangement:Goal: Restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimize the adverse impact on business
operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained
What kind of stuff a DBA can and must do at first sight? Most of it is quite reactive, the goal is obvious: fix-it
Due to things like Database down, database slow, job failures, authorisation failures, storage and so on. A
this kind of stuff isnt justproduction. However this production could be 24/7 and an incident has alwayspriority 1 and escalating. The other environments has other need for attention: all kind of developers and
testers are most of the time quite creative in messing things up.
In the meantime, while the DBA is desperate trying to get the database (and the application software) up andrunning, a manager calls every 10 minutes when its fixed. After that the manager above him.
And hopefully the organisation is quite prepared so the DBA is able to login remote through a reasonable VPN
connection and laptop.
And the A of Adminstrator always kicks in: searching for a solution if the problem isnt that obvious: GooglMy Oracle Support. Updating the call in the not so intuitive ticketing system, logging your actions, write a rep
for the managers how to avoid such a thing in the future.And then, after saving the day for the company at night, appearing happy at work for the daily routine.
Configuration Management
Goal: Provide accurate information on configurations and their documentation to support all the other Servi
Management processes
The first goal of a DBA is to make an inventory of which databases belongs to his/her responsibility- the scope
Call it asset-managment. What versions do they have, how does the test-database differ from production-
database. Who has access to those databases. What patches have been applied on these databases / servers. A l
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of these questions can be easily managed by Enterprise Manager Grid / Cloud Control, but when it does not, thA of DBA is very important.
And what about password management, access to My Oracle Support, documentation, DBA-scripts, version
documentation of the Oracle software running, and your own scripts.
In my opinion its very important to know the stakeholders of the database and communicate clearly whats thconfiguration status of the database and application. In that way the possibility of surprises (changes, lack of
documentation etc.) is decreased.
License documentation also belongs to this process. When does the support contract expire, can we do it cheapwhen does the support contract expire, should we buy more or less in the future, contact with LMS (License
Management Service) of Oracle.
Problem management:
Goal: Minimize the adverse impact of Incidents and Problems on the business that are caused by errors with
the IT infrastructure, and to prevent recurrence of Incidents related to these errors
Investigating the root cause of incidents is part of the job, but also be alerted by errors and warnings in the logfiles or in Enterprise Manager. You can be very busy with investigating something that has never been the cau
of an outage yet.
Speaking of an outage: writing a post-mortem, with your analyses and advise how to prevent this in the future
expected.
When youre lucky, you may have close contact along the way with some engineers of My Oracle Supportfor trying to solve the problem together. That may take a while, and its an art to gently force them to think in right direction.
While monitoring, you may see trends in the behaviour of the database / application server, and report them
accompanied by your adviseto the stakeholders so they can take action.
Change mgmt/ Project mgmt:
Goal: Ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all
Changes, in order to minimize the impact of Change related incidents upon service quality, and consequen
to improve the day-to-day operations of the organization
Most important part of change management is to get involved in major or minor changed BEFORE they will bauthorized by a Change Advisory Board with hardly any knowledge of a database , datamodelling or lets say
weblogic.This involvement can be of any form and can even be outsourced to a service level manager. The point is to
know whats going on and when the sh** may hit you.
Your assignement is to give risk-analyses of coming up changes, even give some Return of Investment opinionInterfere with test plans, communication, backup before the change, rollback when the change fails, the
execution, at what moment is the change considered to be succesful, documentation, scripting
Release Management:
Goal: Design and implement efficient procedures for the distribution and installation of Changes to I.T.
Systems
As stated at change management you should interfere with the changes as much as possible, which implies thayou may be very busy with it. So give the causers of the change the right standards and procedures in advance
will help the understanding between you.Another task: QA on the documentation of the new releases, and judge them according to your standards. You
have to prepare the upgrade / release, test it in advance, and perform the execution of the release/upgrade at aninsane time.
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What about Service Delivery:
Continuity Management:
Goal Support the overall Business Continuity Management process by ensuring that the required I.T. technica
and service facilities (including computer systems, networks, applications, technical support and Service
Desk) can be recovered within required, and agreed, business timescales
The DBA is the centerguard of continuity. He/she can design and describe disaster recovery scenarios such as
Fire, Earthquake, Flood (e.g. leaking roofsit happens!), Power failure, results of actions of a DBA with ahangover and so on.
Installing the configurations for testing the disaster recovery scenarios. The configurations likely differ per
application, and so do the scenarios. Some organisations are testing the scenarios once a year in production.
Availability Management:
Goal Understand the Availability requirements of the business and plan, measure, monitor and continuously
improve the Availability of the I.T. Infrastructure, services and supporting organization to ensure that thes
requirements are met consistently
This process seems a bit like continuity, but availability management is pointing to three metrics:
- MTTR (Mean Time To Repair),
- MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)- MTBSI (Mean Time Between System Incidents)
You should know about the possibilties and configurations of products like Data Guard, RAC, Enterprise
Manager, but also knows about concepts of SAN, NAS, Active-passive, security issues in relation to the SLA the applications.
A big part of the action is implementing backups, and more important: to be sure you can recover from this
backup in all kind of scenarios.
Claim a substantial amount of time and resources to test your various backups!
Service Level Management:
Goal: Maintain and improve I.T. Service quality, through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring and
reporting upon I.T. Service achievements and instigation of actions to eradicate poor servicein line withbusiness or cost justification
Be annoying, interfere with the composing of Service Level Agreements and Operation Level Agreements. Fr
the customers perspective: be curious of the results of the satisfaction surveys (if any taken). Put together a yearly schedule of actions to be taken every month / quarter. Report of the outcome to the
managers so they know that you are doing something for your money.
Report of short or long-term vision regarding database, platform or development issues, so you got control onforehand.
Capacity Management:
Goal: Ensure that cost-justifiable I.T. capacity always exists and that it is matched to the current and futureneeds of the business
Get really familiar with tools like Enterprise Manager and use the reports of the capacity used (CPU, Disks, I/
etc) and the predictions. Where its possible, tune the databases / application servers. Could take a substantial
amount of time.Know the scope of your area and the hardware where your stuff is running, in case a manager walks in with a
management solution (more hardware, Exadata, Exalogic). No problem, but you will have to know the
alternatives.By the way: a substantial amount of capacity is used by backups and the way they are configured. Every day a
full backup, compressed, uncompressed ? Think about it in relation to your capacity management.
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The same is for logging- and auditing- files. Cleaning scripts, is there a reguirement or legal issue to save them
for years?
Financial Management.
Goal Provide cost-effective stewardship of the I.T. assets and resources used in providing I.T. Services
In this era the software-costs, especially Oracle licenses, undoubtably beats the hardware-costs. So a database
responsible should be aware of alternatives, in relation to the guidelines, the principles and the standards of the
company.Should the following be considered in your organisation:
Server consoliditation Use of Oracle Standard Edition (One), or even XE. E.g. in the development environment. Colocation of your servers Database- Software- Infrastructure As A Service in the cloud Use of OracleVM instead of VMware (Oracle)Linux instead of Windows Open Source software
One requirement is that the company knows about the costs and licensing at this point per customer. And this inot always the case. Terms like TCO, ROI, Accounting, charging, does not always mean a thing to a Database
person, but there are specialists in your company who are familiar with it and explain it to you in a managemesummary (so everybody understands it).
Seperately mentioned : the customer and supplier needs attention!
Customer Relationship mgmt:
Know who your customers are. Be visible to them if possible through visiting them, or contact them regurarly
through mail or reports. Perhaps organising a yearly DBA-day with a look into the future, or publish DBA-
newsflashes. Its the first win of gain understanding of customers when something is going wrong in the future
Supplier Mgmt:
Publish / organise a so called engagement model with Oracle of who is talking to who on operational, strateg
and management level. Let them visit you once in a while to discuss incidents, problems and what the role of
supplier can be in this kind of business.
Visit workshops of the suppliers, for technical reasons, but also for your network.
Get the most out of your support contract, Oracle (support) can be of more use than you think at no costs at all
So in the end, what deliverables may be expected:
Deliverables
A stable, secure and resilient infrastructure A log or database of all operational events, alerts and alarms A set of operational scripts A resilience and fail-over testing schedule A set of operational work schedules A set of operational management tools Management reports and information Exception reviews and reports Review and audit reports
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