Re: Trajectory of a [Pg] DBA

On Oct 4, 2012, at 1:44 PM, Thalis Kalfigkopoulos wrote:

> Hi all.
>
> I'd like to tap into the list's experience regarding the job of a DBA
> in general and Pg DBA in particular.
>
> I see that most of the DBA job posts ask for Sr or Ssr which is
> understandable given that databases are among a company’s most
> valuable assets, but it is also an obvious catch-22. So I'd like to
> ask the list's part- and full-time DBAs, if it's not too personal, how
> they landed their jobs.
>
> Is it an easier and more common entry point to be a part-time DBA e.g.
> perform DBA duties as part of being a U**X sysadmin?
>
> Is it more common to start as a developer and change focus to DBA?
>
> In particular how does one go about starting as a Pg DBA? Is the most
> common case by migrating from another DBMS?

As somebody standing guilty of looking for a Postgres DBA for a while now and passing on many people, I think it's pretty safe to say the following.....

We don't really care if you've worked as a DBA professionally or not, senior or otherwise. We do want to know that you can work as a member of a team, under pressure, and understand about the evils of downtime, but you can get that from a lot of jobs. And obviously it's important to know the basics of being a DBA. You know, why we have indices, and when not to use them; why we have transaction logs and how they work; how a database might drive load on a system and how to choose hardware that will cope with that... basically, the stuff talked about on this mailing list all the time. :)

But mostly what we care about - and this is where most people fall down - is how you learn. Do you absorb the minimum of what it takes to get your task done, and then follow that procedure as long as you can? Or do you figure out the underlying principles at work, so you can effectively go off-script? I can't tell you the amount of times people have told me, "Yeah, I like to keep my server's load average under 3 as good rule of thumb" without any understanding of why. Why not 10? Why not 0.5? They just don't know, and being a DBA is all about being ready to go off-script when something blows up.

So if you're looking to be a good DBA, read this list, and learn to understand things you don't understand. That should get you further than most in an interview.