Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Supply and Demand Among DBAs

August 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Supply and Demand Among DBAs

TAGS: Open Source

One of the frequent requests we've heard from MySQL customers in the last year is the need for more certified DBAs. That's one of the reasons we kicked off some seminars earlier this month to help train Oracle DBAs in MySQL. According to the IOUG more than one third of the Oracle users are also running MySQL. But as with any new technology, they don't always have the in-house skills they need. So we did a test run of a couple of "DBA Bootcamp" seminars in New York and San Francisco to train Oracle DBAs in how to use MySQL. It wasn't an "in your face" type of campaign or stunt. We weren't asking anyone to switch from one system to another, rather just explaining how things work. Putting MySQL in Oracle terms, if you will.

The response was overwhelmingly positive. There's a good posting over at the Pythian blog by Paul Vallee on "Why Oracle or SQL Server DBAs probably want to learn MySQL." Paul makes the succinct observation that MySQL is their fastest growing practice. Further he states:

The point I want you to take away from that is simply this: there are about five to ten times more high-value environments running MySQL in the world today than there were three years ago... Together, this means that the population of database administrators that IT managers want to manage their high-value MySQL databases is limited to those DBAs that were already running MySQL three or five years ago. Which is too few to satisfy market demand by a factor of five to ten times.

In other words, it's a pretty marketable skill. I suspect the same is true for most open source infrastructure. If you know MySQL, Apache, PHP, JBoss, Struts, Spring, Hibernate, etc, you will find yourself in heavy demand. But you've got to have real world experience with production systems. Getting certified is a good way to prove your chops.

We will be making available online versions of the DBA Bootcamp seminar in the coming weeks. And based on the interest, we've also lined up some new seminars in September for software ISVs and OEMs in the DC and Boston areas. The morning session focuses on the business reasons behind using open source to reduce product risk; the afternoon session is more focused on technical aspects of performance tuning.

Posted by Zack Urlocker on August 30, 2007 04:46 AM

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