All,
I would like to open
a discussion to solicit information regarding the support structure you utilize
in your Data Management department.
We currently have a
flat end-to-end approach whereby a dba adopts an application and subsequent
database in the early planning stages via teaming up with the Data Architect and
developers and owns that application all the way through design, development,
testing, and ultimately production support.
As a smaller group
(3-5) dba's this model worked fine, and everyone knew their respective database
quite well.
As more and more
applications (internal and 3rd party) continue to rollover from legacy systems
into Oracle solutions, this is proving to be very challenging to provide 24x7
support and related on-call duties spanning three RDBMS platforms (Informix,
Oracle, and MS SQL Server). Our challenges are two
fold:
One, we are (like
any shop today) extremely overloaded with work requests, so this makes
cross-application training to spread the knowledge nearly impossible to
accomplish.
Two, with everyone
tied to a project, we have no resource with large enough buckets of time to take
on new and imperative technologies such as java, replication, high availability,
xml as examples that our development teams would like to leverage in the
database.
We are in the early
stages of looking at organization alternatives. We are fortunate in that
90% of the database support is already centralized in our department for the
company, so that allows us the ability to minimize every dba learning lessons
the hard way.
Specifically, we are
considering some "role" divisions amongst the DBA's. That is to say a
subset dedicated to "engineering" such as implementing and architecting new
technologies and related best practices, a second subset for implementation of
systems being developed, and a third subset for production
support.
I would like to hear
about the organization structure you are involved with and the pro and cons of a
flat structure as compared to a more "role" based structure.
Thanks in
advance,
-Ron-
Lead Oracle
DBA