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MySQL 5 Administration-Part 1 Tutorials
The Job of the DBA / Hiring the Right People
Subtitles of the Movie (MySQL 5 Administration-Part 1 / The Job of the DBA / Hiring the Right People)
The logical thing to follow the last lesson is to talk a little bit about how to hire people and how to get the right people for the job as you're trying to build up your team. So it's important to understand the real skills that are required for the job and the ones that are difficult to acquire and take a long time to acquire as oppose to some of those that might seem like the skills of the job but there actually only surface things that a competent person should be able to pick up fairly quickly. So web developers are not database developers. Game developers are not database developers. Yes they know how to program and that's fine, programming is a wonderful thing but web developers have a whole different outlook on that programming than database developers do. Even if they've used a little bit of PHP to access a MySQL database sometime in the past. That does not make them a database developer. They may have been doing things really horribly wrong with MySQL all that time working through the PHP interface. So take that with a grain of salt. Same thing for game developers, game developers have a whole different mindset. A database developer is going to be a lot more detail orientated than either of those because they're not just trying to kind of get something to work, they're trying to get something to work as well as it possibly can. And that's a big difference between a seasoned database developer and a person who has kind of horsed around with websites or games in the past. That's not to say that all game developers are not detail orientated people but that skill in and of itself is not enough to be a database developer. In the same way system administrators are not database administrators. They have an understanding of different things and as a matter of fact a database administrator needs to know a fair amount about what a system administrator knows. System administrators need to know next to nothing of what a database administrator needs to know and I have seen quite a few people sent to classes before who are system administrators who were sent to a DBA course with one thing in mind. I was told that I need to know how to back up the system. There's more to being a DBA than that and you're going to be bored through most of the course if that in fact is the only thing that you want to learn. You should have a DBA on staff who understands that and a whole lot of other things because if you don't even have somebody who understands backup and recovery, you also don't have anybody who understands much of anything about the database system. And your database system is ultimately going to fail miserably at the worst possible moment and there's going to be nobody to bail you out. So if you are a system administrator who was sent to do this course because you have to do backup have that talk with the boss. You need a database administrator as well, at least a contractor who can come in once in a while and, and set you straight. Okay. If you're hiring analysts, people who are basically tweaking the system and trying to figure out how the system is going on don't require use of specific application software for somebody who's job is mainly looking into the database to do things. That's something they can learn. What they can't learn as quickly is learning the database system itself and how to deal with the database and what the implications of things are in the database. So a good analyst can learn a new application a lot faster than a very experienced clerk can learn analytical skills in the database. So don't go looking for people who know how to use certain SAP or, or Oracle applications or something like that and hire them as an analyst because they may not know the first thing about the actual database behind all of that stuff. They just know all the shortcuts for the keystrokes for doing different things in the application. That's not the job of an analyst. Another thing, we can repurpose people but we have to decide you know how long is it going to take to retrain them. They do need retraining if they're going to be taking on this new job and these courses in VTC are the first step in that but they're not the complete, thorough, ultimate step in that. You will need more training than this but the VTC courses can at least get you going. We're trying to distil a lot of information into a small amount of time but you might also want to consider a live course for that. I'm available for that, there are other companies out there and I do some training for SkySQL and some of the other ones. So consider that as part of the process of moving someone from a job that's similar but not as detailed and thorough as the database job that you'd like them to do. Okay. Hire the mindset with the skillset. The mindset is the most important thing for the DBA to consider for the people that they're hiring. You would want to emphasize that the person focus on efficiency goals and efficiency skills. They need to understand how to make the database work efficiently, that's the job, not just do they understand how to turn it on and off or how to do a backup even. They need to be able to collaborate with other people in problem solving. Mavericks have their place I've been a maverick in my early career but no one person has all the answers and rather than having somebody who is going to spend their time beating their head against the wall until they get it which they never will. Because after you beat your head against a wall for a while, the head becomes less efficient and less able to come up with the answer. So it's better to have people who are going to work with others to find those answers. And that understands where they belong in the team. That is willing and able to give good input but not throw a fit if their idea is not the one that's accepted finally. So they've got to be able to work within the team framework, that would be very important. Attitude is a skill, if I have one short thing to say to you that's very pithy that would be the one. A person who has a can do attitude, can do it with other people and boy, we got to make this thing work as well as it possibly can that's the person that you want. They can be trained for some of the other things but it's harder to train people to think in different directions. It's easy to teach them relatively rote skills. So that's what I have to say about that. In the next chapter we're going to then dive into taking a look at the way in which the MySQL server works. The eco system it works in, some of it's component parts on the inside and I think that you're going to find it a really interesting thing and if you don't find it interesting, maybe the job of DBA isn't the job you were meant to do. Okay. We'll see you in the next chapter.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | MySQL 5 Administration-Part 1 |
| Author: | David Swain |
| SKU: | 34307 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-086-2 |
| Release Date: | 2012-12-31 |
| Duration: | 16 hrs / 171 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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