What do you need to know to become a DBA?

Question

Database administration

I am a sysadmin with some experience. And it so happened that I never encountered databases. I remember the theory of relational DBMS, I can make a rather complex database in Access.

But I have absolutely no idea how to work with other databases (MySQL, PostreSQL, Oracle, etc.), which is the responsibility of a database administrator, such databases. The last time I was looking for a job, a few good places went down, precisely because there was no experience with MySQL. Please advise what to read.

Answer 1

For the past six months I have been working with postgresql dba, and I grew up just from linux admin of all trades ...
how I became dba,
1. in my previous position I constantly worked with postgresql (administration, replication, balancing, pulling, backups, on-the- fly migrations between major ... and so on... the more situations, the more experience
2. in addition, I studied the internals of linux and its kernel (thanks gentoo), memory, processes, etc. The book "The Linux Kernel" by Bovet and Cesatti
3. Not least experience in performance analysis (read Brendan Greg), especially when there are no monitoring, etc., and what slows down you need to find out right now.
4. well, get to know LinkedIn, Habr ... communicate directly with people, attend conferences, subscribe to specialized blogs / RSS (PostgreSQL Planet for example in postgres)
5. specifically for postgres, I can recommend such books
S.Riggs, H.Krosing, PostgreSQL 9 Administration Cookbook PACKT 2010
Z.Boszormenyi H..J.Schonig PostgreSQL Replication PACKT 2013
G.Smith PostgreSQL 9 0 High Performance PACKT 2013

Answer 2

Well, in general, each database has its own documentation, which is quite large,
for example, for postgres www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/index.html
And there most often there is a chapter "administration":
www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/ static/admin.html
That's exactly what you need to know.
Plus all sorts of features of work, jambs, bugs and funny stories from life that you will poison at dinner.
PS. By the way, I was once looking for a postgres admin for 150k. Nobody! Silence, grace, all around designers and programmers.

Answer 3

I work as a system administrator, I have been mainly engaged in Oracle for more than 10 years. Firstly, at least at the user level, you need to know Unix like systems. That is, to be able to set up a system without graphics and understand how it works (memory allocation, IO system). RHEL, Solaris, HP-UX systems. Of all the oracle courses I've taken, I got the most knowledge on "SQL & PLSQL Fundamentals", although I listened to it in 2003 on 8i, start studying this. Courses "DB Administration" were useless to me, perhaps I listened at the wrong time. After the basics of SQL, learn memory allocation, 11g can do it by itself, but you need to know. And be sure to study backup / recovery. And if you work with DBA, study such things as disaster recovery/perfomace tunning, as the need for this is very common and there is no standard solution.

Answer 4

Projects with data less than 100 gigabytes and tens of thousands of dollars a month do not need a database administrator to maintain the infrastructure.

Answer 5

I would advise you to start learning with administration tools, since you know the theory. And focus on one particular DBMS - in terms of administration, all DBMSs have very little in common.

Answer 6

Found a good pamphlet
I sit and light it up.