DBA career

[doublehelix2]

I'm wondering what it takes to become a DBA and what sort of training you could do to become one. Would it be best to take a CS degree or IT degree or can you just do some sort of cert training and get experience too?

What sort of day to day work would you be doing?

What sort of salary ceiling would you not raise above?

 

[doublehelix2]

Where I work, experience and certification counts for more than just a degree (although a degree is an additional nice to have). Blaggers should get caught out by the interview technique whereby someone very experienced grills them about their knowledge.

Can't really say what they do on a day-to-day basis, but part of their role where I work is to support and maintain the existing databases (in production, testing & development environments) and also planning, design, development and implementation of new database applications. I'm sure a DBA can answer this in more detail than I can.

I guess salary ceilings would depend on the organisation you're working for... I'm in the financial sector where salaries are fairly high compared to, say, manufacturing. I've known DBAs to easily pull in £50k - £60k, and that's outside London. I'm sure that there are plenty that don't earn anywhere near that amount though.

Have a look here for a very rough idea... http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk

That's great, thanks for replying. I'm getting the feeling though that there aren't many DBA's here at OC. Is it a boring thing to do? Surely there must be one or two DBAs here?

 

[doublehelix2]

This is probably a stupid question, but how much does it overlap with programming? I know that databases have query language, (read on wiki) but would you have to have knowledge of java or C++?