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 [...]

If you want to become an access path guru, you’ll need to spend some time learning how optimization parameters, statistics and hints affect SQL access paths and statement performance. This blog will provide you with a few hints and tips to help you begin your scientific analysis of the Oracle optimization process. In upcoming blogs, [...]

Those that excel at tuning understand that the tuning process starts with an understanding of the problem and continues with the DBA collecting statistical information. Information collection begins at a global level and then narrows in scope until the problem is pinpointed. Part 1 of this series provides hints and tips that can be used [...]

Introduction
In today’s business environment, being a successful DBA is more than just being technical. If you want to excel in this profession, you must be seen as someone who understands both the business and technical aspects of the applications you support.
In last week’s post, I started providing a general set of recommendations on keeping your [...]

Introduction
If you have been reading this blog, you probably have noticed that very few of them have discussed complex technical topics in-depth.  Trust me when I say we’ll be getting very technical very shortly but I think it is important to cover topics that others don’t spend a lot of time focusing on.
Being a DBA [...]

I thought I would spend a little time discussing the importance of soft skills.  If you want to remain competitive in this profession, you must be able to communicate effectively.  I’ll provide you with a few helpful hints and tips to improve your verbal and written communication skills. The importance of improving your communication skills cannot be [...]