Gary, A cross specialized dba will not be out of a job with mongo, but a sql admin will. Your perspective (shared by me) is hard to see for those who are married to their specialities.
However, I will add one caveat to your statement. When a system gets to a certain size, it behooves the IT team to segregate dba developer and admin roles. From a change management perspective it creates barriers that simplify documentation and auditing. Justin On 1/18/10, Gary Mort <garyam...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 3:53 AM, I Dream in PHP < > hypertextpreproces...@dynamicink.com> wrote: > >> Nobody else thought it was very revealing when someone shouted out "I like >> my job" (assumedly a DBA job) as a reason not to use NoSQL?! I love MySQL >> and NoSQL DBs certainly do not fit all projects, but in the ones where it >> does fit it saves a huge amount of development time and makes the >> dedicated-DBA position somewhat obsolete. >> >> > I don't follow this one. How does it make the dedicated DBA job obsolete? > > Here is my experience withy the DBA world[fill disclosure, I started as a > programmer, moved into Windows Admin and DB2 DBA, then moved to Lotus Notes > Admin and Programming, before moving into PHP/Mysql programming] > > The role of the DBA is to keep the system running, to provide a check on the > developers who tend to throw any old query together and blame the network, > the os, or the database for their lousy performance choices, to recover the > system when it inevitably has some weird failure, and to provide a central > resource for all things data. > > Programmers who butt heads with DBA's would rather just have them out of the > way so they can finish their work. Of course, chances are that programmer > will be long gone when the crud hits the fan and so doesn't give a damn > about recovering from stupid choices. > > Over the years, again and again I've seen the "this eliminates the DBA > position" - MySQL......Lotus Notes.....everything. What they really mean > is that you don't need a DBA to start throwing code up and together and > rolling it out. > > Plus when you have a small team of programmers....one of them becomes the > DBA in effect....doing the small bits of work for it in the initial phases > and providing that central check. > > Where you store the data doesn't matter, you still need someone for all > those functions once your system achieves a certain level of complexity and > commercial value. When having the system down for more than an hour is a > crisis. > > Whether you need someone full time for that, or a maintenance contract with > a consulting team which built the system, is irrelevant - you need that > person there. Monitoring, checking performance, catching problems BEFORE > they occur. > > If all coders where like me...knowing a good bit of network admin, some > amount of systems admin, database admin, and programming - sure you don't > need that. But my experience is that this is rare, most people specialize > in one of those skills.....which leads to a tendency for finger pointing > when things go wrong[it's the network...no its the system...no it's the > code....]. Of course, this always kept me busy with Lotus Notes > troubleshooting problems and implementing solutions when they cross > specialities[I especially would love the discussion where everyone thinks > the "ideal" solution is to fix the problem involving days of effort by one > person....when everyone also acknowledged that there were hour or so of work > arounds they could use to make it work.....but that required THEM to do the > work rather than pawn it off on someone else. So they were all too happy to > cost the company days of manpower to avoid an hours work.] > > Sorry....hotbutton here. I suspect that the "wit" who responded that way > was not a DBA but a programmer speaking as if they were the programmer > stereotype of a DBA....and I have little patience for crap programmers who > only care about their code and are willing to torpedo the business rather > than follow a little process. > -- Sent from my mobile device _______________________________________________ New York PHP Users Group Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk http://www.nyphp.org/Show-Participation
