Some DBA tips

• Be proactive. Don’t let your manager be blindsided in the hallway by some problem you’ve been working on. “You’d be surprised at people who are up all night fixing a problem and don’t tell anyone,” Floss said.

• Be flexible. Are you willing to pitch in on anything? “My favorite person is the person who will do anything that needs to be done,” she said. “It’s also great résumé material. You get an opportunity to learn new databases, new operating systems.”

• Find outside interests. Don’t let work be your world. “There are some people for whom work is their whole world,” Floss said. “We used to love those kinds of people. The problem is when work isn’t going so well, you can really tell. It helps to have somewhere else to funnel your energy.”

• Have fun facts ready. It’s always a good thing to be able to articulate the size of your environment, whether it’s by database management systems, operating systems, gigabytes or terabytes, or the number of instances.

• Make sure you are recoverable. Recovery is Job 1; make sure you can recover. “There’s testing, but what I’m finding now is [that] the fact that it works isn’t good enough,” Floss said. “Can you do it fast? Does it take three hours or 10 minutes? Because that’s system downtime.”

• Highlight SOX vulnerabilities. Try to be friends with SOX auditors. If you know what the exposures are, you can fix them before auditors come in, or you can use SOX as clout to fix them. “It’s not a good thing if a SOX auditor comes in and lists 82 problems with your world, and you knew about 80 of them,” Floss said.

• Balance quality versus time to deliver.

• Understand the applications and provide value to them. “If customers were asked to give anonymous feedback, what would they say?” she asked. “Treat our app development peers as customers. Try to exceed their expectations at times.”
• Sharpen Excel, Word and PowerPoint skills.