A database administrator is a technical person who is responsible for looking after the back-end and structure of data of an organization. He makes sure that the data is available as required, it is well protected from any kind of corruption, unauthorised access and easily accessible to the authorised person whenever needed.
Some of the main functions or responsibilities of a database administrator is installation of the software, testing different new versions, regularly maintaining the backup of the data, providing high level of security to the data, recovering the data in case of any kind of disaster or problem, Managing and maintaining the access or permission part of the data, so that only authorised person can access it, capacity planning for the database.
Some of the responsibilities of a database administrator as day today’s activity are:
- Regularly monitoring the database health
- Taking backup of the data
- Recovering the precious data in case of any sort of disaster
- Optimising the performance of the database
- Upgrading the software of the database
- Patching
- Managing the user of the database
- Managing the overall activities related to database
- Migrating the database
- Providing high level of security to the data
- Working with other team members and associating other as required
Kinds of database administrator
The role and responsibility of a database administrator widely varies according to the size of the company and the business industry. Even though there are many common activities each and every database administrator is expected to perform, according to their roles and responsibility we can categorise the database administrator in the following kinds.
The kinds of database Administrator are:
- Infrastructure database administrator : They are basically responsible for looking after the storage, server and resources. They do not actually focus on the real data and logic.
- Database developer : They are responsible for developing and testing new codes, keeping the database easily available, looking after any sort of malfunctioning of the code, working on the code tuning or enhancing the performance of the application.
If it is a very large organisation then the role and responsibility of the database administrator can even be more granular.
Job summary and functions of database administrator
Job summary and function of the database administrator can be broken down into several activities. These activities may vary according to the platform and the company database administrator is working in, but regardless of any platform they are working in, there are some common administrative responsibilities that a database administrator must be able to perform. some of these common responsibilities are:
1. Taking regular Backup and providing Recovery
Uncertainty or disaster may take place in any sector of the organisation, it can also take place with the data of an organisation. Therefore, the database administrator needs to shoulder a great responsibility of making sure that he can bring back all the data in case of any mishap.
Because of this database administrator must take the regular backup of all the data to face any kind of unpredicted situation of disaster.
There can be tough times when you need to work under a lot of stress yet you need to stay cool and focused regardless of the workload, as your contribution will help the entire company to survive during the time of high work pressure.
2. Providing high level of Data Security
The most important responsibility of a database administrator is to keep the data safe and protected from the hand of any unauthorised access. Therefore, as a database administrator you need to make sure that the data is only accessible to the authorised people, knowing the adequate password policy, scrambling the sensitive data while cloning. You also need to address all the security bugs and fix them to provide ultimate data security.
The database administrator must be a man of integrity and honesty, because as you deal with a lot of precious and important data you need to resist all sorts of temptation to look at them or misuse them. Without doubt there is a lot of crucially important information which will be at your hand. So make sure that you are a trustworthy and honest person to handle the valuable data of an organisation.
3. Enhancing the Performance of Database
Main advantage of the database engine is that it can provide the exact answer of the question from very big piles of data very quickly. Therefore as a database administrator you will be responsible to enhance the performance of the database, so that the response time of quarries meet the user expectation. There are several techniques for enhancing the performance of the database, so you will need to analyse the performance of the database on a regular basis and always optimise it according to the user’s expectations.
There are countless things to learn in order to import better performance tuning to the database. Therefore even if you completely dedicated yourself in the performance tuning, still you will find that there are constantly many new things to learn.
4. Identifying the Problem and presenting resolution
There will always be some sort of problem as you work with the database. You may find something is going wrong most frequently, so as a database administrator it will be almost your regular activity to identify each and every problem and prepare the best resolution plan according to that. You also need to keep the risk factors in mind and decide according to that which solution plan will be the best fit for the current problem.
5. Maintaining the database periodically
Everything requires maintenance, so the database also requires periodic maintenance. Providing maintenance so that the database is supported and bug free is a very crucial responsibility of a database administrator. In order to do that a database administrator needs to perform patching, upgrading, bug fixing etc. There are several tasks to perform in order to keep the database alive and growing. Therefore, it is part of the database administrator’s job to look after the results, keep moving things around, migrating the database to different platforms, exporting and importing data and also reclaiming the space etc.
6. Monitoring the database in regular basis
One of the very important roles and responsibilities of a database administrator is to monitor the database regularly and know the things happening with the database. It displays your professionalism as you know that the problem has taken place and start working on the solution, even before the manager informs you about the issue.
As you regularly monitor every aspect of the health of the database and any arised issues, they actually make you a successful database administrator.
7. Capacity planning for database
Data will keep coming and the size of data will grow and you need to continuously work on the capacity planning for the database to ensure that every data is stored perfectly. You as a database administrator will be responsible to cope the database with the growth of data and manage the resource demand. You will also be expected to assist the manager in deciding the amount of storage needed for launching every new feature and others. Your experience will help you to make the right capacity planning. Moreover, you will really have a great amount of jobs to do regularly to make the database perform well and as desired.
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