Role of system administrator versus database administrator
We are trying to determine who does what in our organization. We have a Unix system administrator and an Oracle DBA. They are actually two separate bodies. In the real world, who is usually responsible for the following areas:
- Oracle installation, patches and upgrade
- Set up standby database and role switching procedure and strategy?
Any information you can provide is appreciated.
In most of the organizations I work with (I'm a consultant, so I see quite a few of these), both of the tasks you list (installation activities and standby management) are DBA functions. Most of the time, the system administrator role is responsible for:
- proper OS patches and monitoring
- proper shared memory, semaphore, and networking settings (kernel parameters)
- storage configuration, mirroring, monitoring for health
- OS-level monitoring on availability of services, overall system performance, et cetera.
- OS backups (usually excludes the oradata directories)
- creation of the oracle user, dba and oinstall groups, OS password policies
- ensuring that the DBA-provided scripts for starting and stopping Oracle processes are set up to do so at appropriate times
- monitoring appropriate OS vendor resources for security alerts and addressing vulnerabilities in the OS
The DBA role is usually responsible for things in these general categories:
- installation, patching, and upgrade of databases
- all configuration of files in the ORACLE_HOME (i.e. network configuration, init.ora files, et cetera)
- database creation, tuning, physical design
- maintenance of scripts to do startup/shutdown for all Oracle processes on the host (give them to the system administrator for execution at proper times)
- monitoring Oracle security alerts for new vulnerabilities and addressing them
- anything else that they have privilege to do under the oracle user account