Role of DBA

Role of DBA

The life cycle of the database starts from designing, implementing to the administration of it.
A database for any kind of requirement needs to be designed perfectly so that it should work without any issues.
Once all the design is complete, it needs to be installed.
Once this step is complete, users start using the database.
The database grows as the data grows in the database.
When the database becomes huge, its performance comes down.
Also accessing the data from the database becomes a challenge.
There will be unused memory in database, making the memory inevitably huge.
This administration and maintenance of the database are taken care of by database Administrator – DBA.
A DBA has many responsibilities.
A good performing database is in the hands of DBA.

Installing and upgrading the DBMS Servers:

DBA is responsible for installing a new DBMS server for the new projects.
She/He is also responsible for upgrading these servers as there are new versions that come in the market or requirement.
If there is any failure in the up-gradation of the existing servers, Sh/he should be able to revert the new changes back to the older version, thus maintaining the DBMS working.
He is also responsible for updating the service packs/ hotfixes/ patches to the DBMS servers.

Design and implementation:

Designing the database and implementing it is also DBA’s responsibility.
She/He should be able to decide proper memory management, file organizations, error handling, log maintenance, etc for the database.

Performance tuning:

Since the database is huge and it will have lots of tables, data, constraints, and indices, there will be variations in the performance from time to time.
Also, because of some designing issues or data growth, the database will not work as expected.
It is the responsibility of the DBA to tune the database performance.
She/He is responsible to make sure all the queries and programs work in fraction of seconds.

Migrate database servers:

Sometimes, users using oracle would like to shift to SQL server or Netezza.
It is the responsibility of DBA to make sure that migration happens without any failure, and there is no data loss.

Backup and Recovery:

Proper backup and recovery programs need to be developed by DBA and has to be maintained him/her.
This is one of the main responsibilities of DBA.
Data/objects should be backed up regularly so that if there is any crash, it should be recovered without much effort and data loss.

Security:

DBA is responsible for creating various database users and roles and giving them different levels of access rights.

Documentation:

DBA should be properly documenting all his activities so that if she/he quits or any new DBA comes in, she/he should be able to understand the database without any effort.
Sh/He should basically maintain all his installation, backup, recovery, security methods.
Sh/He should keep various reports about database performance.

Types of DBA

This DBA is mainly concerned with installing and maintaining DBMS servers.
His prime tasks are installing, backups, recovery, security, replications, memory management, configurations, and tuning.
He is mainly responsible for all administrative tasks of a database.

The database architect is responsible for creating and maintaining the users, roles, access rights, tables, views, constraints, and indexes.
He is mainly responsible for designing the structure of the database depending on the requirement.
These structures will be used by developers and development DBA to code.

DBA should be able to maintain the data and procedures from various sources in the data warehouse.
These sources can be files, COBOL, or any other programs.
Here data and programs will be from different sources.
A good DBA should be able to keep the performance and function levels from these sources at the same pace to make the data warehouse work.

He acts as a bridge between the application program and the database.
He makes sure all the application program is optimized to interact with the database.
He ensures all the activities from installing, upgrading, and patching, maintaining, backup, recovery to executing the records work without any issues.