Oracle Database Administration
If one hundred Oracle database administrators were asked to define what a DBA does, the exercise would probably result in one hundred different descriptions. Nonetheless, there would be a high degree of commonality among these descriptions, and taken as a whole they would probably yield a fairly accurate job description for an Oracle DBA.
When Educational Testing Service (ETS) set out to develop a certification examination for Oracle DBAs a few years ago, the company’s first step was to perform a job analysis, which is a formal way of evaluating and describing a job. The process ETS followed included these steps:
A group of experts was asked to assemble a laundry list of the tasks, skills, and abilities required of a DBA. A survey instrument was developed that listed these items along with a rating scale for the importance of each item.
The survey was administered to a large number of Oracle DBAs around the world.
The survey results were tabulated, yielding an average importance rating for each task, skill, and ability. Those falling below a predetermined cutoff level were eliminated.
The result was a detailed description of the tasks performed by a DBA, and of the specific knowledge and abilities required to perform those tasks. This DBA job analysis then became the blueprint for the Certified Oracle Database Administrator examination.
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