A database administrator (DBA) is a person who is responsible for the environmental aspects of a database. In general, these include: - Recoverability - Creating and testing Backups
- Integrity - Verifying or helping to verify data integrity
- Security - Defining and/or implementing access controls to the data
- Availability - Ensuring maximum up-time
- Performance - Ensuring maximum performance given budgetary constraints
- Development and testing support - Helping programmers and engineers to efficiently utilize the database.
A database analyst is also responsible for the logical and physical design of databases. The duties of a database administrator at a particular site vary, depending on the policies in place and the database management system's (DBMS's) capabilities for carrying them out. They nearly always include disaster recovery (backups and testing of backups), performance analysis, and some database design or assistance thereof. Professionals trained in Database Technology are well prepared to work with high-performance databases such as Oracle 10g and Microsoft's SQL Server.
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