>The reason I ask is I am working at a company in Utah County. They are >a Postgres shop and are outsourcing there DBA responsibility to a >National Consulting Firm. They want to bring in back in house but are >not sure if there are qualified Postgres DBA's here in Utah. So we have >3 options we are looking at. Keep the consulting firm doing the DBA >work indefinitely, Find a Postgres DBA in Utah, or hire someone with >good Oracle, or Mysql skills and keep the consulting firm for 6 months >and get this person trained on Postgres. I am trying to get as much >information as I can before a decision is made.
I'd say hire a sharp guy that knows how databases work regardless of his specific experience and do not worry if that knowledge came from Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, or any other product. To evaluate, have him solve a real-life issue that the customer is experiencing and watch what he does. Pay particular attention to how he fills in the gaps in his initial lack of experience. The guy you want will know what it is that he does not know and needs to learn, will issue correct Google queries, look at the correct manual pages, within those search exactly for the information he needs, and will quickly apply it to produce a solution. I believe in the long run the performance of a programmer/DBA is a function of his general aptitude in the area of computing rather than initial familiarity with a specific product. -- Sasha Pachev AskSasha Linux Consulting http://asksasha.com Fast Running Blog. http://fastrunningblog.com Run. Blog. Improve. Repeat. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
