In the next few days I am posting my top 5 list of what it takes to be a great DBA.  While many may not agree, it is not all about knowledge and insight.   Am I a great DBA?  Time and my clients will tell, but these attributes will help to ensure a long and enjoyable career in the Oracle world.

We will start with #5 -

5. Sense of humor & grace under pressure – Jean Kerr may have been right when she said, “If you can keep your head about you when all about you are losing theirs, its just possible you haven’t grasped the situation”. Most of us have been in one type of crisis or another over the years involving Oracle, the systems it lies upon and users, managers and clients beating at the door with torches and pitchforks. Many of us have wondered if we would survive the onslaught. When you are at the end of your rope, tie a knot, make a joke and hang on, there is little left to lose. I have been in this type of situations many times. Most of the time I have been called into the middle of a disaster (or what is believed to be one) with the simple command of “fix it, it be broke!”, and have a cube or conference call of people staring over your shoulder waiting on every keystroke.  As bad as my typing is, that is never a good thing to watch.

The first truly memorable situation I had like this was back in the 1997-1998 timeframe, the web was just taking off and Amazon.com was the darling of the internet boom.  I was working for Oracle Support at the time as a technical specialist which is supposed to mean that I know more than most about how the database kernel worked when I got called in because Amazon was down.   The call between myself and their DBA became the two of us and about 30 other people all on the conference call.  I was not allowed to hang up, transfer or call the client back.  Everyone, including a seniror Oracle VP and two VPs from Amazon were on the phone and expecting me to articulate every move I made while manually rebuilding several datafile headers with a hex editor that had become corrupted due to a bug.  Someone noted that Amazon had just made the national news because they were down.  It was not pretty.  But after being on the phone for 422 minutes (our phones had counters on them) every one signed off and the problem was fixed.   The point to this anecdote is that I had to, with politeness and humore, be able to tell everyone on the line two things, one that I was not going to repeat every keystroke I made to the audience and two, to please shut up and let me do my work.  That if they had to make business or political decisions do it on another call.  I was tired, grouchy and more than once had to hit the mute button, but kept my cool with the customer.

Now, I have been in the situation where I screwed up and all the only non-explicative thing I could say was to quote that great American philosopher Urkel – “Did I do that?”. Oh boy, believe me, if you have been in the business long enough, you will break something, and break it bad. I have overwritten datafiles, dropped the wrong table, killed the wrong node, just to mention a few.

For those that know me, I fully admit, that when the mess is over (and sometimes when I push “mute” on the phone before it is over) I can get grouchy, grumpy and generally be a joy to be around.

However, a sense of humor does not always work, and you have to know when to pick your battles, as it were.  There is one hospital client I was working with when I first started working with McKesson. I was on a conference call with them and let out a couple of my humorous observations at which point I would swear I heard crickets in the background. I realized very quickly that they had no sense of humor and dropped it at that point. The best part of it was that I have not been on a conference call with that client since!

No one wants a comedian during a crisis.  But establishing a good raport with a client or group that is experiencing a problem or just in general is often easier with a little good humor and a lot of empathy and grace.

Today Oracle announced it was buying Sun Microsystems in a deal tentatively valued at $7.4 billion.  Why does Oracle want Sun?  One reason and one reason only, Java.  Java is a key part of Oracle’s Fusion middleware strategy and Oracle’s ownership will drive changes in what is supposed to be an “open source” programming language to meet their own needs.  

The bigger question is, what will Oracle do with the rest of Sun?  Sun is really a hardware company that happens to “own” java.  Larry Ellison has said several times in recent years that he does not want Oracle to become a hardware company (remember the Network Computer?).  While this may be true, their partnership with HP on the fast selling (and big margin) Exadata project shows that this statement is rather flexible.  I would imagine that Oracle will sell off the parts of Sun it has no need for, probably to IBM.   Sun itself has been cutting staff consistently for eight years now.  I worked a consulting engagement with Sun’s storage devision back in 2005, right at the time Sun bought Storage Tek.  The result?  I large part of the division was scuttled almost immediately as it was all but replaced by Storage Tek hardware.  On a personal level, I am glad it killed my contract, as a few days later I began my great releationship with McKesson.  However, quite a few people on that campus were cut. 

This may not be the case, however.  Oracle has been going to great lengths to own the software stack.  Currently, a company can start with Oracle Enterprise Linux, add the database, application server, Fusion middleware and a whole host of Oracle applications derived from Oracle apps, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and others.  It is no longer a best of breed scenario.  The next logical step would be to own the hardware that runs the stack.  You might think that this would put Oracle at odds with HP, but I don’t think so, they will more likely begin a transition to the same love/hate relationship Oracle has with Microsoft.

Another unaswered question from the conference call was the fate of MySQL.  I never thought it was a good idea for Sun to buy the open source database in the first plance, but now Oracle owns it.  I seriously doubt it will become the new Oracle Lite, more likely any functionality deemed worthy will just be absorbed into the Oracle DB kernel, much like Times Ten and Sleepy Cat were.

It makes me wonder, however, if Oracle still has the cash to make the multi-billion dollar purchases, what will be next?  If Bill, Steve and the crew in Redmond get worried, I guess with all the cash Microsoft has in the bank, they could just buy IBM…or Oracle.