Duties of the database administrator

Author:  Sakari Mattila  
Version: 25-Oct-1999 (experimental)

The database administrator (DBA) is an information technology expert or a well-trained, computer literate person who is responsible for the technical operations for a database or all databases in an organization. The duties of the database administrator vary, below is a typical description.


    Management tasks
  1. Liasing with management.
  2. Liasing with database users for advice and needs.
  3. Facilitating sharing of common data by overseeing proper key management and data dictionary maintenance.
  4. Procuring and maintaining database software and related documents and tools.
  5. Liasing with other information technology professionals for information exchange.
  6. Liasing with the database software vendor and, when applicable, database content vendor.
    Security tasks
  7. Monitoring and maintaining security of databases and database software on corporate, application, database, role, program, and when applicable, table, view and column levels in co-operation with security experts and systems programmers.
  8. Granting highest level access rights and revoking these rights, monitoring use of these rights.
  9. Maintaining database software licenses, when applicable, database content licenses.
    Day-to-day tasks
  10. Maintaining development, test and production database environments, starting and stopping databases.
  11. Monitoring the databases and optimizing database performance and use of resources, including selecting optimal physical implementations of databases.
  12. Maintaining availability and integrity of databases, including referential integrity checking and multiple access schemes (locking).
  13. Installing database software, if necessary, with systems programmers and network managers.
  14. Monitoring and managing database backups and, when needed, restorations, big loads to databases and porting databases or parts of databases.
  15. Helping application programmers to install and tune their database related programs, when possible, also giving guidance in effective use of database features.
  16. Overseeing the maintenance of the database content with persons responsible for the application.
  17. Creating and deleting databases and public database objects.
    Planning tasks
  18. Database capacity planning: processing capacity, storage capacity and back-up capacity.
  19. Database security and integrity planning with security experts, systems programmers and network managers.
  20. Reviewing and developing data models and database designs with development teams; entity-relationship models are used with relational databases, normalising, denormalising, indexing, and defining views.

Depending on the organisation and the content, there are five major types of databases:

  1. Databases containing structured data, the most common subtypes are relational database and object databases. The contents of these databases is maintained by the business transactions and it is used in the business transactions and business reports.

    The search criteria is "Report a set of entities having this value of the search attribute".

  2. Databases containing freely linkable (associated) information on various types of entities, intelligence databases . These databases are used as a tool in solving complex one-off problems.

    The search criteria is "Report all entities and associations similar to this" or "Report all entities fitting to this pattern".

  3. Databases containing free-format text or multimedia data, text or multimedia databases . These databases are used in handling unstructured texts or multimedia data. The data may be tagged (see W3C-XML) indicating meaning of data or permanently linked to maps (GIS), drawings, etc. to allow easy access to data.

    The search criteria is "Report all entities (texts, sounds, images, etc.) containing this character string, sound sample, image fragment, etc. or very similar to this".

  4. Databases containing references to articles, books, WWW pages and similar external materials, reference databases . These databases are used for literature searches.

    The search criteria is "Report all entities (references) containing this value (term or name) in specified field".

  5. Databases containing logical and mathematical inference rules and data for these rules to operate upon, knowledge databases. These databases are used as a tool in solving repeating complex problems or as a part in embedded problem solvers.

    The search criteria is "Report all information matching this question with specified level of elaboration" or "Report the solution".

Real-life databases are often combinations of above types.

The actual content of the database may be data, graphics, images, sound, video, etc. In fact, anything which can be mapped onto bit patterns.

The tasks of the database administrator vary depending on the type of the database. The terminology is also different for different types of databases.

There may be different levels of database administrators. Following are typical in Oracle relational database environments.

A. DBA with SYS access and Oracle liaison, only one person with strong information technology training and two named back-up persons.

B. DBA with SYSTEM access, limited number of persons, including highest level DBA back-up persons, all with strong information technology training.

C. DBA with granted DBA privileges, limited number of users with good information technology literacy, when needed by applications.

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