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up vote 7 down vote favorite

For my job I work on a JavaEE application with PostgreSQL as the database. Although we have a sysadmin for our productions servers, who also manages our database servers, we have no full-time DBA which makes me wonder if there are any. I would imagine any full-time dedicated DBA would work exclusively with Oracle database. Am I overlooking something or am I correct in assuming that there are no dedicated Postgres DBA's?

PS: I'm just asking this out of sheer curiosity.

PPS: I wanted to tag this question with DBA but apparently that would be a new tag. Could someone make this for me?

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5 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

Judging from the activity on the PostgreSQL jobs mailing list I'd say it's not all that uncommon to find full-time PostgreSQL DBAs.

http://www.google.com/search?q=full+time+site:postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs

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Thanks! I honestly had no idea, I figured any application of sufficient size would be an Oracle or other named brand. – rbottel Jan 11 '11 at 10:06
up vote 4 down vote

Sure there are. Of course in many cases, you don't need a full time DBA for PostgreSQL, but on the other hand, places like Skype, myYearbook.com, and Afilias have teams of full-time PostgreSQL DBAs.

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up vote 6 down vote

We shouldn't forget to mention Yahoo! With a search engine and web portal of that size, we can only make rough estimates on the size of their PostgreSQL DBA teams..

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I was not aware that Yahoo used PostgreSQL ... can you provide any proof of that? – jcolebrand♦ Feb 5 '11 at 19:34
Sorry for the lack of any links... Here is a link. Here is another link with a little more details. And here is a third link. It's a heavily modified, custom version though. – uygar.raf Feb 5 '11 at 21:59
up vote 2 down vote

Yes there are, and the numbers may be on the rise. In the last 3 months of this year, I have been contacted by 3 local companies looking for full time PostgreSQL professionals, in an area typically dominated by MSSQL and Oracle (SE United States). I took one of them, and now work mostly with PostgreSQL after working with SQL Server for 12+ years.

I would imagine any full-time dedicated DBA would work exclusively with Oracle database.

There are dedicated database administrators for all major platforms; it is not a role exclusive to Oracle.

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up vote 1 down vote

PG dbas are rare and hard to find. What does not make matters easier is that the going salaries can range from better than Oracle or SQL DBAs at companies that require PG for their most critical applications, and experienced difficulties finding the appropriate personnel. Others seem to try to hire on the cheap not making it worthwile for DBAs to stay or switch to PG.

PG is believed to be easy to manage, and developers or sysadmins get stuck with the admin duties. It's usually only when these database suffer severe issues, or the need for HA, D/R, replication etc... comes in that a DBA is sought.

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protected by jcolebrand♦ Sep 17 '12 at 22:11

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