Being a
database administrator has its ups and downs. Listed below are just a few.
GOOD BITS:
1 - It pays well
2 - The job is so boring you can get away with doing absolutely nothing all day. Nobody dares ask you what you are doing in any kind of detail because the answer is sure to drive them to drink. You can actually see peoples eyes glaze over as you explain the more subtle points of block buffer caching and latch waits
3 - Many of the tasks you have to complete take so long that you can spend most of your day on Everything noding.
4 - The job is so technical that nobody who actually can bear to listen to you explain things can actually grok what you're saying anyway. So you can tell them any drivel you want and they can't argue.
BAD BITS
1 - It's boring. It's so boring you get almost catatonic whilst working.
2 - It's not a job with any babe pulling power, i.e. the line 'How would you like your SQL to go faster?' is not a great way to get laid
3 - Team nights out are crap. Someone telling the one about how Steve accidently set db_block_buffers parameter to 100 on the production database is just not my idea of a good time.
4 - When you meet other DBAs you get involved in my database is bigger than yours type converstations. 'Yeah, well its only 500G but the transaction rate is a bitch'. The 500G here is always pronounced '500 G', never '500 Gigabytes'
5 - System Administrators are bastards and lie to you about how long the restore will take. Or BOFHs lose the damn backup tapes
6 - People coming up to you and saying 'The database is REAL slow today, what did you do?'. Which is akin to a luser telling you the internet is slow today. Yeah, right. What bit asshole?
7 - People coming up to you and saying 'The database isn't working today, what did you do?' just because they ran a query on customer names starting in 'ZZ' and it didn't return any rows.
8 - You spend so much time working you rarely get to spend the money you earn.