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Opinion
Welcome to the "2 Day DBA"
by Justin Kestelyn
Oracle Database 10g's intense focus on nearly every aspect of database manageability pays off for database administrators
With the introduction of Oracle Database 10g, database manageability becomes a more important technology category than ever before.
Manageability has always been important, but it is now acutely relevant for two main reasons, which sit on opposite poles of the enterprise complexity spectrum: first, because increasing numbers of small-to-medium business (SMBs) want to (and can) take advantage of powerful infrastructure software only without that software's traditional management overhead; and second, because the enterprise grid architecture that is attracting the attention of CIOs in larger enterprises requires an integrated manageability stack to ensure scalability and efficiency. And across this spectrum, companies of all sizes continue to face competitive and operational pressures that are making "traditional" approaches to data management more and more difficult.
The advanced Oracle Database 10g features for Automatic Performance Diagnosis, Automatic Storage Management and Automatic Memory Management, and Automatic SQL Tuning are getting most of the attention, and rightly so. But the release also contains a host of smaller, less obvious features—details like Flashback Table, improved tablespace management, and row versioning—that will have a major cumulative impact on the free time of DBAs. In fact, 10g reflects unprecedented attention to the details and productivity of the DBA's common daily tasks, with the goal of reducing operational costs associated with tuning, capacity planning, user creation and maintenance, and so on by as much as 50%.
One payoff of this intense focus on manageability is the new Oracle Database 2 Day DBA curriculum, an introduction to Oracle Database 10g features and functionality that is designed to provide newcomer DBAs (or at least newcomers to Oracle technology) with all the information they need to manage a small-to-medium 10g configuration via online self-paced study. (This curriculum is available free of charge on OTN in HTML or PDF format today, but for those who prefer instructor-led training, an Oracle University course is available. An Oracle By Example module is available on OTN as well.)
Based on Enterprise Manager as the administrative interface, 2 Day DBA takes you through a series of common DBA tasks—from "Installing and Building the Database" through "Monitoring and Tuning," and everything in between—with the express purpose of providing fluency in the skill of keeping the database up and running. (Enterprise DBAs will also find useful information about best practices.) The curriculum's tone is conversational, didactic, and practical, with an emphasis on hands-on tasks over vague concepts. It's a great example of "actionable" documentation, of which in general we have too little.
With the introduction of the self-management infrastructure that makes a "2 Day DBA" possible, it's now time for many DBAs to reconsider what it "means" to be a database administrator, considering that administration may become the least of their concerns. Rather, with more free time to study the nuances of planning, modeling, and application development, perhaps they will become more like database analysts: knowledge experts with the important job of squeezing the most possible business value out of business data, while letting the database literally take care of itself. Now, that would be progress.
Justin Kestelyn is Editor-in-Chief of Oracle Technology Network.
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