Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Tom Kyte's DBA Resolutions for 2009

Tom Kyte, Oracle DBA and founder of the Ask Tom blog, gave the Oracle Database Insider his resolutions for 2009 in hopes that other DBAs will follow suit. "In the coming year," says Kyte, "I resolve to...

o Practice a restore at least once a month under different scenarios. DBAs are allowed to make mistakes—with one exception: They cannot make mistakes in recovery. We can fix any other mistake easily, but not recovery mistakes.

o Learn something new. When was the last time you read the "what's new in" chapters in the documentation? Take a couple of minutes to see what's new.

o Participate in user group discussion forums. If I just do the same thing day in, day out, never experiencing what others are doing, I'll stagnate. The easiest way to stay current, to network, and to learn something new is to participate.

o Become a mentor for someone more junior. I'll get two things out of this: First, I will learn a ton of new stuff because they will ask me things I don't fully know. Second, I'll have put in place the next generation of DBAs so that I can move up or move over in the future. Training your replacement is one sure way to be able to progress yourself.

o Be more thoughtful, don’t jump to conclusions, take my time. As the old saying goes, haste makes waste. And that is never more true than when doing something that will take hours or longer to accomplish, as many DBA tasks may take. I will study the options and pick the one that is best suited for the problem at hand—realizing that the approach I take in 2009 might be very different from the one I took in 2008, 2000, 1995, or any other time.