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What is DBA Salaries

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What is DBA Salaries

You can find no more challenging job in IT than database administration. Fortunately, DBAs are well paid. DICE.com, a career planning and research Web site, provides valuable statistics on DBA compensation. For example, database administration is one of the top ten contract jobs when ranked by salary, as well as one of the top ten jobs for full-time employment. The mean compensation for DBA consultants is $81 per hour; the mean level of experience just 4.98 years. For full-time employees with four or more years of experience, the mean salary ranges from the low $60,000s to over $80,000. Figure 1-1 shows the mean salary for full-time DBAs broken down by years of experience.

Another Web site, searchdatabase.com, a portal of database information for IT professionals, conducted a salary survey of database professionals. As of late January 2001, the average annual salary for all database professionals was more than $62,000. As might be expected, as the years of experience and the number of people managed increases, so does the salary. Of course, DBA salaries, as with all salaries, vary by region of the country. In the United States, DBA salaries are usually higher in the Northeast and on the West Coast than in other regions.

So, DBAs are well paid, have challenging jobs, and are likely to be engaged in the most visible and important projects. What's not to like? Well, DBAs are expected to know everything, not just about database technologies, but about anything remotely connected to them. Database administration is a nonstop job, and DBAs work long days with lots of overtime, especially when performance is suffering or development projects are behind schedule. DBAs frequently have to work on weekends and holidays to maintain databases during off-peak hours. A DBA must be constantly available to deal with problems, because database applications run around the clock. Most DBAs carry pagers or cell phones so they can be reached at any time. If there is a database problem at 2:00 A.M., the DBA must get out of bed, clear his head, and solve the problem to get the applications back up and running. Failure to do so can result in database downtime, and that can completely shut down business processes. DBAs frequently spend weekends in front of the computer performing database maintenance and reorganizations during off peak hours. You can't bring mission-critical databases down during the nine-to-five day to maintain them. According to industry analysts at the META Group, the average DBA works more than fifty hours per week, including an average of six hours on weekends.

So, database administration is technically challenging and rewarding; it can also be exhausting and frustrating. But don't let that scare you. The positive aspects of the job far outweigh the negative.

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