Our Mission

The DBA teams’ mission is to provide friendly, innovative and quality database services and solutions to the Enterprise and all City departments in a timely manner.

·        Log Technical Action Reports (TARs) as necessary against a new, upgraded, or existing version of the RDBMS and arrange for, apply, and verify patches as necessary.

·        Coordinate the ordering, storage, distribution, and tracking of database software under the Site License Agreements.

·        Monitor and advise management on database licensing issues.

RDBMS Monitoring

·        On a daily basis, verify that nightly (or periodic) backups have run successfully; examine all appropriate logs (alert logs, startup logs, shutdown logs, tuning information, etc.); verify that all databases that should be up and running are available.

·        Perform housecleaning tasks as required: purging old files from the database software areas ensure that archive logs have enough disk space (if applicable), etc.

·        Perform on-going database performance tuning and work with Technical Services on operating system specific performance issues related to the databases; i.e., system patches which may be required or system parameters which may need adjustment.

·        Monitor the space used by each database, space availability on a system-wide basis and generate future capacity plans for management’s use.

·        Coordinate upgrades of system software products to resolve any database and/or operating system issues/conflicts.

·        Research, test, and recommend for purchase tools related to database administration or propose tools for development in-house.  Disseminate database information to the developers and users when appropriate.

·        Perform maintenance activities such as database resizing and database reorganizations.

Application/Project Support

·        Consult with departments on the evaluation of third party database designs, selection of database vendors, acquisition of database related products under site licensing arrangements, installation support and training, and development of interfaces between departmental and enterprise databases.

·        Perform logical database design tasks, as needed, including normalization, identification of referential integrity needs, and determination of field types and sizes.

·        Determine the space (disk storage) and configuration requirements for a proposed database - working with the developers and System Services.

·        Perform physical design tasks including determining the space and configuration requirements for the database, assignment of tables/records to tablespaces/areas, and identifying indexes based on a functional design review.

·        Allocate the space for and build the database per the Optimal Flexible Architecture standards within the available hardware configuration.

·        Develop and maintain interfaces between enterprise databases, as well as the interfaces between departmental and enterprise databases.

·        Plan, coordinate, and execute updates to application databases as requested by ITD staff or third-party vendors, as appropriate.

·        Determine and implement the backup/recovery plan for each database both while in development and as the application moves to production and coordinate that plan against database availability requirements.

·        At periodic intervals, test the recovery plan for each database.

·        Monitor and coordinate update of the database recoverability plan with the site’s disaster recovery plan.

·        On an ongoing basis, monitor each database for performance while the application is in development to identify potential performance problems before getting to a production status.

·        Once an application is turned over to production, provide an ongoing tuning process for that database - adjust shared pool size, DB block buffers, log buffers, etc. as needed.

·        Monitor table and tablespace growth and fragmentation on a periodic basis to ensure that space allocation does not become a critical issue.

·        Maintain an ongoing configuration map for each database on development, staging, and production including any links to other databases.

·        Provide 24-hour on-call support for all production database systems.

·        Possess sufficient knowledge about the database tools’ normal functional behavior to be able to determine if a problem is tools-based or application-based.

·        Be able to log Technical Action Reports (TARs); apply patches; and coordinate with developers to verify that a patch has corrected a problem - without causing other problems.

·        Assist developers with database design issues and problem resolution including knowledge on how to run and understand the output from the Explain Plan utility.

Database Standards

·        Define and maintain database standards for the organization to ensure consistency in database creation, schema definitions, and tablespace, table, constraint, trigger, package, procedure, and index naming conventions.

·        Create naming conventions for Oracle SQL*Net files (LISTENER. ORA, TNSNAMES.ORA, etc.), DB2 attachment facility entities (CICS RCT table, TSO clists, etc.), and IDMS teleprocessing components (logical terminals, physical terminals, etc.) for ease of installation, configuration, and maintainability.

·        Where appropriate, write and distribute procedures (both step-by-step narratives and actual code) for tasks that must be performed frequently.  These tasks include, but are not limited to, database reorganization, the rebuilding of test databases, and the migration of objects from the development to staging and production databases.

·        Define standards for database documentation.

Security Issues

·        Set and maintain User and DBA passwords for all databases and document same.

·        Create user and developer accounts and distribute appropriate privileges as needed to approved people by authority of approved people and document same.

·        Maintain a secured environment for the migration of entities to the staging and production databases.

·        When appropriate, use database audit facilities to monitor table/record/user activities.

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Last modified: 09/22/07