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The author of this template bears following credentials:
19 Years DBA experience
Certified DBA for leading database system
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DevOps Application Support Data Migration OLA / SLA Operations Level Agreement System Documentation Project Management Deployment Backup Quality Assurance Compliance and Standards Database Administration Data Centre Robustness Requirements Start-up PhaseAchieving Operational ReadinessStabilized Operations

DBA Duties & DBA Job Description

Summary and Scope

This toolkit for Self Assessment addresses the problem that there are many DBA-activities which are NOT assigned:
  • The Project managers think that that those are done by the DBA-team, but
  • the DBA-team feels themselves as pure SYSTEM-DBA's and just ignore the DBA duties of Development DBA and Application DBA's, or
  • the DBA-team's activities are per job description explicitely limited to System-DBA's activities, leaving Development-DBA's and Application DBA's activities uncovered.
If you have just a job role "DBA", but not a dedicated job role "Application DBA" those 19 "Application DBA" duties listed in this document must be explicitly assigned to either "Application Support" or to the "DBA" - otherwise they might not be executed!

Risk

Your DBA-team feels themselves as pure System DBA and typically tasks of Application DBA's are not executed. But as in your organization no dedicated Application DBA exist, you will run in long term into troubles, as many important tasks are just not executed. In case of in house development the missing Development DBA will result in production problems. This situation is not immediately obvious, this his will be detected long time later - in the optimal case you will just need a huge repair / reorganization project (for which of course neither budget nor headcount was planned) and of course a big outage will be required, or you will suffer from shortcomings until application retirement.
An increasing number of laws e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) or Basel II require external audits of IT systems. And even if in your organization everyone knows what he has to do, auditors often ask for documented evidence. But even if you are not affected by those laws, clearly documented and assigned duties, optimal validated quarterly or once per year, e.g. by an self-assessment, will help you to pass checks from internal auditors, internal QA-department or internal Revenue Assurance (RA) department.

The Solution

Part 1, the base document breaks down the DBA's work to 60 detailed tasks and indicates for an usual situation which tasks are assigned to System DBA, Application DBA and Development DBA. Additionally it contains a description of the tasks.
Part 2 contains two templates for Self-Assessment: Ask each of your DBA's and members of application support to mark in that template which tasks are in scope of their work Afterwards an evaluation of the returned templates might indicate tasks which are not executed at all.