Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Justifying Job Specialization
Database administration is often organized as a responsibility within the infor-
mation services (or information technology, depending on your organization)
department. However, this does not mean that the tasks should be handed over
to the department as general responsibilities for anyone who happens to have
the time to take care of them. Many of the functions involved in the manage-
ment of data are highly specialized and require specific expertise. They can vary
from long-range data planning to working with the idiosyncrasies of a particu-
lar database management system. This argues for a full-time staff of specialists
who do nothing but manage a company's data and databases.
A good example of this is database design. To do a really good job of both
logical and physical database design requires considerable education and practice.
The question then becomes one of who among the information systems per-
sonnel should be responsible for designing the company's main, shared data-
bases. The systems analysts? The application programmers? Which systems ana-
lysts or application programmers? Even though one of these choices is often the
solution, it doesn't always make a lot of sense to have any of these people design
the databases for at least two reasons. First, it is unreasonable to expect any of
them to be as expert at designing databases unless they specialize in this area of
development. Second, if any one application development group designs the
shared databases, they will tend to optimize them for their own applications and
not take into account the needs of the other applications. The solution is to have
application-independent, full-time database specialists (i.e., data and database
administration personnel), who are experts at database design and who optimize
the database designs for the overall good of the company.
Justifying Operational Management
At the operational level, for the day-to-day management of the company's pro-
duction databases, an independent department must be responsible for data and
database management, for the reasons already mentioned. Since the data is likely
to be shared among several corporate functions and users, the data should be
managed by an independent group whose loyalty is to the overall company rather
than to any individual function. Also, someone has to make sure that any peri-
odic data updates take place, overseeing the application or personnel responsi-
ble for those updates. Once again, it's prudent to have an independent data
administration group keep track of who is responsible for updating which tables
and to monitor whether these persons have kept to the expected schedule, for
the benefit of all who use the data.
Working with the databases at the operational level requires an in-depth
knowledge of the DBMS in use, of the databases themselves, and of such spe-
cific skills and tasks as physical database design, database security, and backup
and recovery.
