On Thu, Oct 04, 2012 at 05:44:54PM -0300, Thalis Kalfigkopoulos wrote:
> I see that most of the DBA job posts ask for Sr or Ssr which is
> understandable given that databases are among a company’s most
> valuable assets, but it is also an obvious catch-22. So I'd like to
> ask the list's part- and full-time DBAs, if it's not too personal, how
> they landed their jobs.
>
> Is it an easier and more common entry point to be a part-time DBA e.g.
> perform DBA duties as part of being a U**X sysadmin?
That's an excellent way to become experienced in any database system,
but particularly Postgres.
I'm not a DBA these days at all, but I guess I was a fairly senior one
when I still had that sort of job. I landed my job (at what became
Afilias) by having a clue what a Postgres was. Before that, I'd
worked on some projects in other jobs where I'd used Postgres, so I
had a little bit of knowledge about how the system worked, and I had a
reasonable depth of knoweledge about how its environment worked. It's
this combination that is rare.
A difficult thing about hiring DBAs to work on Postgres, I found, is
the frequency with which people with database backgrounds want the
database engine to be in charge of everything. Postgres is really
dependent on the services of the underlying operating system in a way
that many other comparable RDBMSes are not (or try not to be). It's
this sort of understanding of the way multiple parts of the system can
work together that I was always looking for in a hire. I usually had
to hire people who'd mostly worked with other RDBMSes, but who liked
Postgres for some reason and could tell me why. I never used
automatic tools to match employees to my job descriptions, however,
because I thought that they depended too much on keywords. It's easy
to use keyword whittling on Oracle DBA hires: you just look for a
magic number of years and the right certification, and you probably
have a competent (but likely not stellar) candidate. If you try to
find people with 5 years' Postgres experience, well, come to this list
:) The shallow pool of qualified Postgres admins remains one of the
costs of using Postgres today: you add cost to your administration. I
think the cost is worth it, note.
Hope this is helpful. Good luck,
A
--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs@crankycanuck.ca
