We've been looking for a good MySQL DBA at work for a little over a year now. At this point I'm beginning to wonder if DBA's are a dying breed all together...
Maybe it's the fact that we're in the Northwest (Seattle), or perhaps they've all gone to work for Percona?
Perhaps everyone has more fun developing? (We haven't had much trouble filling our Sr. Development positions or QA positions..)
It's getting to the point that I've actually tried to figure out how practical it would be integrate a remote DBA group like Percona, the Pythian Group, ProvenScaling, etc, etc... but that gets very complicated and impractical from a stand point that we really need a DBA that can play on both sides of the fence (operations and development), and work on a daily basis with our development group and QA teams on multiple projects using the Agile development methodology.
I know we're not the only ones in this situation up here ( and maybe that's half the problem).
Hmm... maybe there will be a couple good WAMU DBAs looking soon.... ;)
Well, if you're a decent DBA, enjoy working with open source, like the northwest, and are looking for a new, challenging position, send me an e-mail ... ( phil.hildebrand@gmail.com )
5 comments:
I can tell you that we certainly have clients that we work on a daily basis with. You get a team of DBA's, though it's a small team (3-5 people), so even if one goes on vacation the other folks know what's going on.
I'd be more than happy to have a conversation with you about whether or not Pythian can integrate into your environment -- we actually specialize in exactly that type of integration -- there are some clients for whom we *are* the DBA team, and others for whom we are a *part* of their existing DBA team.
(or you can always call our sales line, but if you want to talk to me about my honest opinions about whether or not Pythian would work in your environment, I'm happy to hear what you need and see if we can help out there...)
Just thought I'd leave the obligatory "You're not the only one" post. Same set of problems here in Maryland - need someone on site to manage the database through development, test, and release, work with the regular developers, and also do the production DBA work.
Isn't that funny? I'm a pretty good MySQL DBA, looking for remote work (I live on the east coast). While I don't generally have a hard time finding work, I'd have more if some companies would make the effort to embrace remote workers. The companies that do embrace it find it to be critical to their success, and yes, some of them even use an Agile development model. "Agile" is not a synonym for "anti-remote".
The way this usually works is that one person on the team calls me, puts me on speaker, and I hang out until the rest of the people show up for what is usually a "stand up" meeting. It works fine (but I almost never stand up. Don't tell anyone).
The agile methodology has been a life saver, to be sure, but there are managers out there who read one book about it that doesn't mention remote workers, and they think it's therefore "against the rules" of Agile. It's not -- it just requires some independent thought and creativity to make it work properly for your specific environment. And even if it were against the rules, remember that, before there were books about it that we could all point to as validation of the methodology, Agile was also against the rules. :-)
Hey Tom -
That's a good question. It's probably different from company to company. We look for DBA's with multiple years experience, hopefully with experience at both large and small companies, with a good understanding of both the development side and the operational side. Ideally they have experience training other DBA's as well.
If we find someone we like, that doesn't have all the experience we're looking for, we'll usually consider bringing them on as a DBA, with the understanding that they will become a Sr DBA.
I'd say a Sr should have a least 5 years as a DBA, even better if it's with multiple database systems, and be very comfortable with the basic internals of how things work in general with databases (optimizers, indexes, concurrency, storage engines, high availability)
@brian... you may wish to become "contactable". Your blogger profile is not public, and your last name isn't in your screen name.
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