Re: young guy wanting (Postgres DBA) ammo

--- Greg Smith <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com> wrote:

> On Fri, 2 Nov 2007, Kevin Hunter wrote:
>
> > I don't have "ammo" to defend (or agree?) with my
> friend when he says
> > that "Postgres requires a DBA and MySQL doesn't so
> that's why they
> > choose the latter."
>
> [snip]
>
> To step back for a second, the software industry as
> a whole is going
> through this phase right now where programmers are
> more empowered than
> ever to run complicated database-driven designs
> without actually having to
> be DBAs. It used to be that you "needed a DBA" for
> every job like this
> because they were the only people who knew how to
> setup the database
> tables at all, and once they were involved they also
> (if they were any
> good) did higher-level design planning, with
> scalabilty in mind, and
> worried about data integrity issues.
>
> Software frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Hibernate
> have made it simple
> for programmers to churn out code that operates on
> databases without
> having the slightest idea what is going on under the
> hood. From a
> programmer's perspective, the "better" database is
> the one that requires
> the least work to get running. This leads to
> projects where a system that
> worked fine "in development" crashes and burns once
> it reaches a
> non-trivial workload, because if you don't design
> databases with an eye
> towards scalability and integrity you don't
> magically get either.
>
As one of these programmers, where is the best place
to find the information I need to get it right.
Finding information, and finding good information is
not the same thing, and I am wary of 99% of what I
find using google. Since you know what a DBA needs to
know, I ask you where I can learn what you believe a
good DBA needs to know. Or am I OK just relying on
the documentation that comes with a given RDBMS
(Postgres, MySQL, MS SQL, &c.)?

Ted