DBA to Oracle DB Ratio

Question

What is the industry standard Production (O&M) DBA to Oracle DB ratio?
Thanks!

Answer 1

I don't believe there is any such "standard" ratio and I'd be rather leery of any suggested number. Realistically, the answer is highly dependent on the organization.
- Some organizations will create hundreds of small databases rather than creating a single database with hundreds of schemas or with different applications sharing the same schema. It's not 1/100th the effort to manage that one large, complex database that it is to manage the 100 separate small databases.
- Different organizations have different requirements for what the DBA is supposed to do. If your DBAs are also supposed to manage the applications, manage user security, work with developers, sit on change control boards, etc. that takes away time that they could be spending on managing databases. If your organization applies every patchset and upgrades to each new release, that can also require a fair bit of effort that another organization that hasn't upgraded since 8.1.7 can avoid.
- Different applications require different amounts of work to maintain (again, depending on DBA job descriptions). Your 10 TB data warehouse with hundreds of nightly load scripts probably requires more DBA work than the departmental receipt tracker. Then again, the departmental receipt tracker may be the result of 2 weeks of development by some intern years ago that suffers from constant faults that require DBA intervention.
- Different organizations use different feature sets. If you're using cutting-edge Oracle features, it's more likely that you'll be encountering errors and more likely that your DBAs have to spend cycles getting up to speed on new technology. If you're only using features that have been around since Oracle 7, the DBAs may have less work to do. Unless, of course, people have been implementing features that Oracle provides manually, thus requiring regular DBA involvement.
Justin