Don’t expect to get by without any DB2 skills

This is quite a common issue in many organisations where development is carried out offshore and there is a local admin/support function but no local DBA resource.

In this story Triton were initially brought in as a “one off” exercise because the developers were complaining about poor query performance and asking to move to another RDBMS.  These developers were highly skilled in SQL and could write clever, complex queries, common table expressions, etc.   On questioning the developers we found out that they had only a basic knowledge of DB2 and no specific skills whatsoever.

We configured a basic set of automated housekeeping routines which resolved performance issues and made developers happy, but in the process a lot of other issues were uncovered with data quality (developers coding inefficient SQL to get around duplicate data that shouldn’t exist).

The solution was simple – a Triton support contract to provide DBA support.

The Moral

Skilled developers are not enough.  A skilled DBA is needed for most applications