Profiting from big data means changing how your organization views data. Big data is often unstructured, and wringing value from it demands advanced analytics. Does this mean that conventional Oracle DBAs, with their relational database focus, are irrelevant in this new world order? Or do big data challenges make the Oracle DBA role more vital than ever to business operations?
Personally, I think any claims that Oracle DBAs are diminishing in relevance to today’s enterprise are spurious. How can data experts not be increasingly important when companies are accumulating and storing more and more and more data—and keeping more and more of it “live” and accessible across petabytes of ever-cheaper disk space in both their own data centers and in cloud storage?
An Oracle DBA is not just a data administrator, but also a data management expert. While some have more experience than others with managing unstructured data, most Oracle DBAs have valuable data integration, data quality assurance, database performance troubleshooting and analytics/reporting skills.
Organizations looking to maximize the return on their big data investment need to make the right choices upfront to point them toward success. What big data framework would work best in your environment? What tools can best drive the analytics you need? Oracle DBAs have the “data design” skills firms need help build the foundation for a big data solution.
Beyond that, Oracle DBAs understand how to manage data, and how to translate business requirements into reporting and forecasting capabilities. They also are likely to have a nose for “data exploration”—identifying and capturing key data elements. Indeed, in many organizations Oracle DBAs, both employees and consultants, are the people building the new skills that it will take to harness big data.
At the same time their criticality as a knowledge resource is increasing, Oracle DBAs are becoming more visible within the enterprise. Data is now seen as an opportunity and a source of business value. How can you collect and collate data to support better decision-making and better understand our customers? Ask an Oracle DBA.
So while newer roles like “data scientist” or data analyst might seem hot and hip, the Oracle DBA is far from outmoded. The DBA role is certainly changing to accommodate big data skill sets. But in many companies focusing on big data, the Oracle DBA becoming more important than ever.
Contact Buda Consulting to learn how Oracle DBA outsourcing can help your organization derive more intelligence from its data.
Inspiration for this post came from:
- http://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/data-management/big-data-big-opportunities-for-dbas.html
- http://searchoracle.techtarget.com/opinion/How-can-todays-DBAs-contribute-to-big-data-databases
