In this post, we will continue our discussion on effective communication skills and the role they play in our careers. This two-part blog entry is a somewhat lighthearted look at my own life’s lessons on effective communications (or lack thereof).   In future posts, we’ll look at different mechanisms we can use to communicate and coordinate [...]

As we all know, effective verbal and written communication is critical to the success of any business activity.   The more complex the activity or the more coordination that is required to complete a given task, the more important effective communications becomes.    There are very few tasks in the DBA profession that don’t require some level of coordination between [...]

As we learned in my last post, effective measurements are required to judge the success of any activity.  The blog also contained some recommendations on questions to ask your customers in order to determine if you are delivering high quality service.     After the responses are received, the customer feedback data needs to be evaluated quickly [...]

As we learned from my last post, it takes much more than technical skills to become successful as a database administrator.  One of the key measurements DBAs can use to evaluate their performance is customer feedback.  We feel so strongly about customer feedback at Remote DBA Experts that we have created a customer feedback strategy [...]

Let’s deviate from tuning for a couple of weeks.   I’d like to turn our attention to a topic that I have lightly covered in the past.   It is the premise that it takes more than just being a great technician to keep DBA customers happy.  There are dozens of database “experts” out there that are [...]

Setting up a Successful Test System in Oracle This meeting is held as soon as the application developers are ready to begin the actual coding process. The ultimate goal of this meeting is for application developers to have a firm understanding of what is required to create and maintain a successful Oracle test environment. Discussions [...]

Let’s continue our discussion on the Art of Being a Successful DBA. The intent of this blog is to help administrators design and standardize on a formalized design review process. The goal of the design review process is to identify and address application design, process flow, program logic and SQL statement problems early in the [...]

I absolutely and firmly believe that Data Administrators are the unsung heroes of the Information Technology profession. This blog will be shorter than most of the upcoming blogs you will see from me.  As a writer, I’m not noted for “keeping it brief”.   I used to be an Oracle instructor and I like to pack [...]

Ever fumble around at 2 AM looking for that SQL statement you wrote a while back? You know, that one special script that will give you just the information you need to solve the problem and go back to bed? I must admit, I have done my fair share of moonlight script hunting. This blog [...]

Let’s start our series on Art of Being a Successful DBA by covering the art of good documentation.   Although the importance of a well thought out and detailed documentation library is blatanly obvious, creating documentation is the task most often postponed by an overworked DBA unit. Documenting processes, procedures and best practices is a task [...]