--------------------<snip>---------------------
True, MF skill sets seem to carry grey hair, close attention to
retirement benefits, and boring pictures of grandchildren. Not to
mention cranky OF's ;-)
Also true is the proliferation of tinkertoy skill sets. But wait,
something's wrong with that picture.
Perhaps it is that the skill sets are not really comparable. A good DBA
is a good DBA, and those skills tend to be platform independent. But
many of those skills come with experience in the trenches, so just how
good can a DBA be if he/she is below the legal drinking age?
----------------------<unsnip>-----------------------
Alcohol or Geritol? :-) Another feature of a good DBA is a detailed
knowledge of the tools he/she uses, and that only seems to come with
experience.
------------------------<snip>-------------------
But I think (sadly enough) it is much simpler than that: the tinkertoy
skills come in a -much- less expensive package. Therefore, the business
case is not as clear as we technicians would like to think. A given
management team may decide that the high performance, high availability,
and high security is not a cost effective solution for their business
mission. Let's face it, exploiting those features is hard, tedious, and
costly work.
-----------------------<unsnip>------------------------
But how many consider the cost of NOT having these features? Far too
few, IMHO.
-------------------------<snip>-----------------
Consider: do you charter an 18 wheel tank truck with an armed guard
escort to transport gasoline for your lawn mower?
------------------------<unsnip>------------------
Considering current trends, that might happen! :-)
-----------------------<snip>-------------------
Even a multi gazillion dollar enterprise routinely processing megatons
of highly sensitive data may elect to deploy a ancillary application on
a tiny server. That, in fact, happens all the time.
-----------------------<unsnip>-------------------
But they didn't get that big by making what we would probably consider
faulty decisions. Some functions might be very well suited for smaller
platforms. For example, some function that is computation-intensive
might work well on a smaller platform, whereas database mining might
well be suited for the larger, more I/O efficient platform. Each
application and platform has pros and cons.
------------------------<snip>--------------------
Some potential good news is that auditors may be (finally) starting to
apply the same rules to the tinkertoys as the MF.
-----------------------<unsnip>-------------------
It's about time. Such things as change management and quality control
have some serious catching up to do. And security can be abysmal.
--------------------------<snip>-------------------
But do I advise young folks to consider the MF as a career? Tune in
tomorrow.....
-------------------------<unsnip>------------------
I do, just because we're all getting older, and retiring, with nobody to
take our places.
The whole IT "industry" is evolving; we need to recognise this evolution
and adapt to it. Can we all say "Natural Selection"? Machinery will
change; usage will change; we need to learn to recognize the strengths
and weaknesses of each platform. Blinders off, wide-angle vision on. Now
if we could convince management and schools of this, good sense will
follow and "management by airline magazine" would come to a
well-deserved end.
My personal $0.02, YMMV, (insert favorite disclaimers here).
F wrote:
We use IMS and DB2 on z/OS today and was wondering if we should consider
moving to distributed systems like Oracle or SQL Server.
Reason being, we are concerned about mainframe skill sets on IMS and
DB2. Also the news around many systems moving away from mainframes keeps
us wondering what to do.
Can you recommend whats the latest out there ? How many companies are
going through change and away from it and how many companies are
actually going strong and developing heavily on it ? For those in the
latter bucket, what about your skill sets? In my company, half of them
are planning on retiring soon.
Thank you
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