Eric,

I4ve read the mail you sent in response to Mel Berg, on 01/20/99, about DBA's responsibilities and I have on question for you: are the activities regarding to modeling, creating and managing tables in a DB, part of the DBA's responsibilities? I had a discussion about it and one people told me that those activities must be made by a DBA.

-- Anonymous, June 30, 1999

Answers

Danielle,

The way we do it here at the Washington State Department of Transportation (an agency with 6,000 employees) is to have 2 DBAs, a Data Modeler, and many (say 50+) developers. Theoretically, before a database is created the Data Modeler guy is supposed to review the developer's design (model) to make sure that it is reasonably normalized and that the data represents the way we do business. Then I create the database, designating the developer as the database owner.

The developer is then responsible for creating and managing (indexing and monitoring the size of) tables. Thus, around here, the developer creates the model, and after the DBA has created the database, then creates and manages the tables.

In smaller shops, and for smaller projects, these duties may be combined. In fact, at the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, I previously managed what we call the Client Registry database. This project had two to three technical staff, including myself. I created the model, the databases, the tables, managed the tables, and managed the backup. My title was therefore Database Manager rather than Database Adminstrator.

Hope this helps,

Eric

-- Anonymous, June 30, 1999

I agree with Eric response mainly because a DBA can provide in larger shops support to multiple servers that support multiple applications. Therefore the applications administrators should maintain the modeling and table maintenance operations.

Im currently providing Pacific Life with DBA and application administration and therefore my title is more generic. I do believe that a DBA should be aware of the data structure to be able to provide insight regarding performance increase, but not necessarily create the model or maintain the data structure.

Arik

-- Anonymous, September 07, 2000