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Anyone know of a person who is certified in SQL database administration? We're trying to find out what a reasonable pay scale is for such a person to work on a temporary project in Tennessee.
It's more of a diagnostic/fix it trip with periodic followup to make sure the system stays "tuned."
Also may need some Visual Basic programmers for short term. Also require certification, probably. Also TN.
But right now, I'm just trying to figure out costs.
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I'd need to know the platform and exactly which certification you're interested in. Both Microsoft and Oracle have several different levels that vastly affect pay scales.
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Noemon, thanks for the idea! I found some good salary info. Not a bad gig, apparently, being an SQL DBA.
Dagonee...I don't know the particulars (it isn't for me, or I'd know). But I can find out. I'm pretty sure it's a Microsoft shop, however, because they were talking about moving to Oracle as if it was "the dream for the future" not a current state of affairs. But I will confirm.
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The SQL cert is meaningful, but I'd strongly advise against requiring certifications for the programming end of thing. If you don't have someone qualified to evaluate programmers in-house, you'll probably do best by bumping the pay up a bit above market in order to ensure attracting a good field of candidates and then going by successful, similar (and have the applicants tell/convince you why they were similar, demonstrating critical, evaluative thinking) projects completed or somesuch.
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For Microsoft DBs, the high-end certification is MCDBA. It represents a significant learning investment. Much more so than a programming certification, it gives a good indication that the person understands how to administer SQL Server databases.
That being said, SQL Server is self-tuning enough that only very high-end enterprise systems need the full certification. Frankly, if someone has passed the "Designing and Implementing Databases with Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 Enterprise Edition" and "Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition", they're probably good enough, as long as they have solid project experience.
fugu13 is absolutly right about finding a good programmer. When I had to hire programmers, I always asked them what they would have done differently on the project they talk the most about.
Good programmers are always thinking of ways to do things better, especially on their own stuff.
The advice applies to almost any kind of IT professional. Have a knowledgable person in the room while interviewing, and ask for specific descriptions of projects on the resume. Have the knowledgable person give you a couple of very specific questions in advance. For example, "Describe your disaster recovery plan and indicate what the acceptable downtime and rollback levels were." This separates those who have done from those who have only read about doing it.
The programmers we're a bit less worried about at present.
"Self-tuning" is an interesting concept. What we know right now is that the thing isn't running as well as it used to and we want someone knowledgable to check it out. That might mean tweaking some parameters, or they might just tell us the problem lies elsewhere.
Fortunately for our clients as well as the people who will do this work, I'm not in charge of their efforts. I would not do this kind of thing blind, or even half-sighted as it is too important and I'm not qualified.
In other words, I won't be the one interviewing and selecting candidates or laying out what jobs need to get done.
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posted
Oh, and we didn't write the current application either. We wrote a previous one that they now wish they'd kept.
But we're trying to help them figure out how to fix the new one because it would cost them too much to just abandon it at this point. Unless it just isn't maintainable or fixable in a reasonable timeframe at reasonable cost.
Such is life. If IT people who don't know beans about traffic safety would just stop trying to write their own systems, we'd all be much happier.
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<ruminates> Two things have always really amazed me: how simple the design of efficient databases actually is, and how many people decently experienced in databases aren't very good at following the principles of it.
Some of my favorite ways of expressing those principles: fit the database to the data, factor to the idiom, index where you search, databases are for bookkeeping, views are for interpretations, pool to the optimum by testing, and cache database results where reasonable.
While there is of course significant art to fine tuning database performance, many databases, including quite complex ones, are more than ok just by following those guidelines, and further optimization is just wasting man hours, and often more cheaply accomplished by throwing hardware at the problem . </ruminates>
I doubt that is the case with your database system, and altering in place databases is significantly more touchy than designing ones from scratch.
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