10 biggest DBA concerns

I completed a survey on DBA main concerns amongst the readers recently.

 I expected more responses about Security Management, but they were a low percentage and didn’t make it into the top 10.

 Considering the amount of financial and government data residing in databases along with lack of  data security knowledge  this is concerning.

 The top 10 DBA concerns in order of concern.

1)    Time restraint. Not enough hours in the day to complete DBA tasks. Including,  managing production changes out of business hours

2)   Poor planning.  Project management, capacity planning, resource requirement, timelines.

3)    Database performance. 

4)   Increased storage of data. Resources to manage are static.  Data storage requirements are growing,  human resources to manage is static

 5)  Downtime.  Pressure to decrease size of maintenance windows

 6)   Performance degradation.  Monitoring and developing “standardised” responses to performance problems.  Understanding different storage arrays. Troubleshooting disk related issues.

 7)  Inadequate time spent on tuning and performance issues.

 8)  Increased DBA responsibilities. The DBA responsibilities are growing in certain companies. A constant theme was the transition to offshore DBA resources – defining the areas of responsibility and managing the resource.

 9)   DBAs concerned skills are  becoming obsolete . Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), NoSQL, Citrix, VMWare in many organisations  touch the DBA. 

10)  Auditing. In the Financial Sector ,  DBAs spend an increasing portion of their time  dealing directly with Auditors or supporting application owners preparing information for Auditors.

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