Oracle Database Management Strategic Directions

1. Best Practices for managing Oracle database servers.
2. Oracle Fusion Middleware products like J2EE, ADF, XML, BPEL, SOA, Web Services, Discoverer...).
3. Oracle Application Servers and Apache.

In going to different companies every month I am consistently seeing a DBA skills gap in the peripheral areas of being a DBA. In the old days, a DBA that understood the operating system, networking and the development environment was a pretty complete DBA. Especially since in the old days, DBAs came from the development ranks and could support developers. In today's complex database environments, there is a definite skills gap in DBAs understanding the environments around databases. DBAs don't need to be experts in these areas, but should at least be comfortable in some of the areas surrounding databases:

• Operating system.
• Basic networking knowledge.
• Storage management.
• RAID levels.
• Striping and mirroring concepts.
• Middle-tier fundamentals (Application Servers, connection pooling, caching, connection best practices from Java, .NET, PHP, etc).
• J2EE environments (Web Services, WSDL, SOA, BPEL, ...).
• XML.

DBAs with peripheral skills in some of these areas are worth their weight in gold. With the complexity of database management it is getting harder and harder for new DBAs to have strong DBA skills and peripheral skills of the environment surrounding the database.