<p>I heard about this thing called a database administrator, and I am interested in hearing some opinions from CC members. What is your experience with it if you have any? Who among people with CS, systems engineering, and electrical engineering degrees would be the most qualified for a database administrator position? Just curious because I heard good things about it. Is it more of like a certification thing that you don't really need an engineering degree for?</p>
<p>I would imagine that the best sorts of degrees would be…
IT, MIS, IS, CIS, etc.</p>
<p>The next tier would be…
CS, CE, SE</p>
<p>I would place these at the lowest applicable tier…
EE, SysE, IE</p>
<p>Database design would be part of a computer science program, not an engineering program.</p>
<p>Thanks for the replies guys also could you address the other part of my post which is about the DBA being a certificate based position over a degree. susgeek I thought an engineering mindset (specifically from the majors I mentioned) might be applicable to database design.</p>
<p>Database design is primarily a theoretical mathematical function. Designing a distributed database architecture would be computer systems. </p>
<p>There is an “engineering” component involved, but not in the sense of an electrical engineer that might design a circuit board, for example. </p>
<p>I have never known a database administrator that didn’t have a BS CS degree or something similar. If one has a certification (i.e. Microsoft Certified Database Administrator), it would be in addition to a BSCS.</p>
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<p>Well, actually, I know a a lot who don’t have a BSCS. Heck, some I know don’t even have a college degree at all. </p>
<p>The truth of the matter is, you don’t really need to go to college to have a decent career in IT, including as a DBA. In fact, I am convinced that a reasonably motivated high school student could learn the proper skills and obtain the proper certifications. All you would really need is to obtain software from one of the major vendors such as Oracle or Microsoft, which you can often times do for free or only a nominal price if used solely for training purposes, get a couple of old PC’s as a lab testbed (and PC’s are dirt cheap these days), buy some books from the IT section from your local bookstore, and start reading and practicing. Do that diligently, earn some of the initial certifications, and you can probably get a decent entry-level jr. DBA job right out of high school. Granted, maybe you’ll be making only $10-15 an hour to start, but hey, that’s pretty decent for somebody right out of high school. From there, you just keep learning and building your skillset. </p>
<p>Frankly, I’m surprised that more high schools refuse to not only provide opportunities for students to learn these skills, but won’t even inform their students about these opportunities. That’s why most high school graduates are not employable because they don’t actually have marketable skills. Let’s face it: companies don’t care if you can deconstruct Chaucer or can write term papers on the War of 1812. But they do care that you know how to help them maintain and upgrade their company database, even if at only a junior assistant level.</p>
<p>I’ve worked in database engineering for 25 years and worked in management sciences providing information services from databases that I was responsible for. Some of the work that I did could be considered the job of a DBA though.</p>
<p>In the 1990s (Boston Area), DBAs made a good paycheck and then outsourcing hit around 2000-2002 and then it seemed as if the number of DBA opportunities dropped sharply. I don’t watch that particular job market but perhaps it has rebounded given the desire to keep that position close to the vest (corporate headquarters).</p>
<p>In traditional IS shops, the DBA managed the physical layout and added indexes or changed layout and dealt with hardware issues. They took care of access control to tables for both users and developers. They also had to deal with production problems so if you had batch jobs running overnight or the backup failed or you lost a disk, the DBA might have to get involved if the operations staff couldn’t resolve the problem. So you could get called in late at night or on weekends. You would have to deal with new version releases (database software, operating system software, new hardware) which could mean running in parallel somewhere or running in a test environment at night or on the weekends and then switching back over to your production environment during the day.</p>
<p>Today the landscape is far more complex with remote mirroring, the choices in hardware, software tuning capabilities and dealing with security given far more access tools into the database.</p>
<p>I generally saw DBAs as coming from IS schools. You dealt with a lot of business people and their needs and knowing something about business was helpful in understanding their needs. The IS major also gave you some programming experience so that you knew a little about what the developers were doing. Today, databases are used in a much wider variety of applications compared to the traditional business applications in the 80s. You have internet companies like Yahoo, Google and Facebook that have to deal with massive amounts of data. You may have chemical or biological databases or databases with natural science data. The appropriate major may be different depending on the area that you will be dealing with.</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses they’re really helpful. I have access to several e-learning courses from Microsoft, would it be worthwhile to self study “Transact-SQL in Microsoft SQL Server 2008”? At my school there is no IS degree, so I think the closes thing would be CS.</p>
<p>First off when you take a Database class as a CS undergrad you will likely learn the underlying fundamentals and principles of how databases work and functions. Usually relational databases. You dont learn how to administer a database or databases. You lean how to create a database from scratch, not how to instantiate a previously designed model. </p>
<p>What everybody said above is all true, though I will add that those with a CS degree and a class in relational databases usually with some brief reading can quickly gain the knowledge to do the job of a DBA. </p>
<p>I also highly suggest you learn the fundamentals rather than specifics.</p>
<p>My first university database course used Chris Date’s book, An Introduction to Database Systems, Volume I. It provided a nice survey of legacy databases (CODASYL, Network, etc.), exercises in SQL, ER modeling. The second volume of his book goes into some database internals which is usually done in an advanced or graduate course.</p>
<p>A guy that I worked with a long time ago taught a graduate advanced database book and the course went through Michael Stonebraker’s book which goes back to System R and Jim Gray. There’s a ton of history and theory in that book. I gotta run - might write more later on.</p>