Becoming a DBA

Question

Hey sorry for the rookie post, I just figured there would be no better place to ask for advice then here, since there are many knowledgeable people here. So here is the deal, I have worked with PC's all my life (I'm 28 now) and I have had my own business repairing them (not much, but decent amount of customers), also I started working in the online adult market in 2000, I went to a local tech school and learned programs such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, etc. After that school, I expanded my learning on my own, I picked up HTML, Javascript, some Perl, as well as designing, maintaining and marketing numerous adult sites. I didn't want to be a "porn" king for the rest of my life so I wanted to find a new career. I worked also in the MIS department for a Manhattan advertising department for about a year before I went into adult full-time. That was a good experience but at the time the commute was impractical. The only problem I had now was that I had no "Formal" education i.e. certifications etc. BUT through a certain government program I was awarded a $25k grant to go to school (A certain computer institute with a good reputation) and they have this Programming Power Course that gives me an OCP certification, then basically a CIW certification, then an MCSD .NET certification all one right after the other, that is what the government approved me for. I start very soon. I am really excited. My thought is this though in your guys best opinion, what do you think my job prospects will look like when I get done with all of this? They told me I could get in with a "very serious" company whatever that means. Hey no matter what my career looks like when I get out, I would be a fool to tun down a free education of this caliber. Any advice I would really appreciate. Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

If you have access to Google, check out Google groups - specifically comp.databases.oracle.server - and search for your topic.
All in all, the answer is totally regional.
My personal experience (as an Oracle analyst/developer/DBA/instructor for over 20 years - since 1984) is there is currently an excess of competent DBAs due to lay-offs in the past 2 years. Junior developers with SQL Server 'experience' are attempting to full the gap, and failing miserably (due to the differences in the weay things work internally). As a result, many managers are now regretting their decision to replace experience with lower cost and starting to hire DBAs again - but only experienced ones.
Best, in my opinion, is to get developer experience. And learn the core of Oracle. Read many books, especially by anyone from the Oak Table (http://www.oaktable.net). Know the contents of all of Tom Kyte's books off by heart (see http://apress.com), and be able to reproduce any of the performance analysis scenarios he discusses, and variants, on demand.
Also realize that DBAs are excessively detail oriented. The best ones I know have little black books, and are meticulous about writing every observation and every environment change into those books. Any time they are challenged, out comes the book with a "on June 15th 2003, at 2:14 PM, we did a restart of instances Gloomb to enable the following initialization poarameters)
In contrast, developers tend to 'flit'. [flit derived from butterly fluttering.] They are detailed enough to get the current project done, then fly to the next. The idea of maintenance , long term associaton with a specific project, evaluating every aspect of 'that code' to get the best performance, and doing so year-after-year is generally not a developer trait.