Beginning Oracle Database 11g Administration From Novice to Professional

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CHAPTER 15 THE BIG PICTURE AND THE TEN DELIVERABLES
If you take the lessons in this one chapter to heart, you can quickly become a better
Oracle database administrator than you thought possible. Competency in Oracle technology
is only half of the challenge of being a database administrator. If you had very little
knowledge of Oracle technology but knew exactly “which” needed to be done, you could
always find out how to do it—there is Google and there are online manuals aplenty. Too
many Oracle database administrators don’t know “which to do,” and what they have
when they are through is “just a mess without a clue.”
An Instructive Job Interview
Early in my career, I interviewed for a “Programmer/Analyst” job at Hewlett- Packard. The
manager who interviewed me gave me the following test. He explained that the problem
was to produce a report containing sorted employee information and asked me to draw
a flow chart explaining the approach I would use to solve the problem. He gave me some
paper and left the room for half an hour. When he left, I wrote a COBOL program that
sorted and printed a file of employee records. I prided myself on my programming skills
and I was certain that the program would work correctly the first time.
When he came back, the manager read my program carefully and complimented me
on my programming skills. Then he told me what I had missed. I had written a complete
COBOL program but had completely ignored the Software Development Life Cycle:
Initiation, System Concept Development, Planning, Requirements Analysis, Design,
Development, Integration and Test, Implementation, Operations and Maintenance, and
Disposition. 1
In summary, I was a very good COBOL programmer but did not see the big software
development picture.
Well, I did not get the job at Hewlett- Packard, but soon after that I got my first job
as a database administrator—at Intel. Database administration became my career and,
in time, I became the manager of a team of database administrators managing 1,000
databases for a large service provider. My technical skills were never stronger, but there
seemed to be something missing. We were burned out from working 60 hours every
week, we felt unappreciated, and we were constantly at loggerheads with other groups.
In time, I realized that technical knowledge was not enough. We needed to understand
how all the pieces of IT fit together and how they interacted with each other. In
other words, we needed to see the big picture.
1. A good introduction to the Systems Development Life Cycle can be found at
.