Dr.DBA

I was at the hospital the other day, with an annoying boil in my neck. While waiting for the doctor rite I was kinda contemplating on why the title Dr. is so prestigious and us DBAs are the ignored bunch. Nobody even as so much as flinch when they hear you are a DBA but when you just say you are a Dr everyone is all of a sudden magically impressed.

Dont get me wrong, Doctor is a great and noble job. All I am saying is DBAs are too. DBAs mean Database Administrators. We protect data in case you didnt know. So neway, to prove my point

Case in point 1:
Doctors save lives. We save data!
Anyone in IT will know that often data is the soul of an application. Besides your application being practicaly useless w/o a database we technically protect data. Now this benefits the company greatly in terms of reputation and reliability. When a company is reputable and reliable they often make good money thus they pay the employees well. If you think about it indirectly we save lives too!

Case in point 2:
People only come to us when they need us.
How many of you actually remmember the name of the doctor who treated you the last time you were in GH? We only remmember doctors when we are sick otherwise we are not even bothered rite. This is the same as us DBAs. People only come to us when they have a problem, then they forget us until next time there is an issue

Case in point 3:
Both of our jobs requires us to be oncall.
Many people dont know that we DBAs are also required to be oncall. We often have a responding time limit. If we dont respond fast enough we will get escalated, most probably loose our jobs which is equivalent to getting your license revoked if you are a Doctor.

Case in point 4:
Public holidays are just another day for us.
Yup, just like hospital cannot run if there is no doctors, application cannot run if there is no data. Thus we need to be there to support.

So then people, do you think we DBAs need more recognition as the ones like doctors get? We are doctors, just not for humans, we are doctors for databases. We practically deserve a doctorate!

Think about it.

;)