I welcome you to this section of database administration. I am really excited to have you here for this once again wonderful and enjoyable session 😍. Database administration is one of the most interesting areas of data management. Guess why 😔 . Don’t worry. Leave the guessing 😆. It is a backbone of most organisations that use databases for storing information and serving clients. Just imagine a bank serving clients and all over a sudden its database goes down. Or just imagine waking up to check your social media app and you can’t access the information simply because the database is down. Just imagine when you are a CEO of a large firm and a malicious hacker breaks into your clients’ database and stills all the passwords 🤦♂️. Just imagine you’re the client and you find out you lost all your money on the account and the bank informs you the database was hacked and your password leaked. But investigations are going on 🙄. It is really furious 🙇♂️.. Companies loose a lot of money due to database downtimes, brand reputation is lost, clients loose a lot, among others.
Database Administration
This background illustrates the relevancy of database administration to only one the organisations but also clients and everyone. It is an area that should be treated seriously. After setting up the database, we need to plan on ensuring it is available to the clients whenever needed. It is not only about availability, it is also about ensuring the right people have access to the database, those with access to the database can only do specific tasks that they should do, ensuring the security of users is guaranteed, data is backed up and readily available for recovery in case of a disaster, actions of database users can be tracked for accountability and investigation, database performance is key (who likes using a sluggish system? Yaakh 🤮). All these are the tasks encompassing database administration.
Prerequisites
In this section of database administration, we are going to go step by step into what we database administration is all about using Oracle Database. Oracle is one of the most popular databases used by many corporations around the world. It is a relational database and a background about relational databases is so paramount. You can read about relational databases here. By the end of this season, you’ll be good at Oracle database administration. The skills you learn in this season will be helpful even if you end up using another database platform. An understanding of SQL will be so paramount. If you need to understand SQL, I recommend you to read posts about it here or you may watch my videos from YouTube here. Some bits of the section may require an understanding of the language.
DBA Job Position
Before we start our journey, lets look at the Database Administrator job position. Database Administrator is the role we’re preparing for by the end of this section. The demand for people with database administration knowledge is skyrocketing due to the huge volumes of data at companies’ possession these days. This data is so critical to the organisation’s success since it helps in predicting market demand, serving clients, projecting the future, analysis, among others. To understand more about this job position, I highly recommend you take some time to read about the who and what a DBA is supposed to do here. I find this resource so important.
Case studies of data breaches.
Different companies have been faced with data breaches ranging from large firms like Microsoft, NASA 🙄, IBM, Netflix to small firms. Some of these breaches left the world in a shock and they’re ever documented. They are in most cases due to poor database administration. You can take a look at all of them of a few of them to understand the gravity of the task ahead of you using the links below:
98 Must-Know Data Breach Statistics for 2021 (varonis.com)
The 15 biggest data breaches of the 21st century | CSO Online
In the next section, lets look at the Oracle Database Architecture.
Summary
1. Background of database administration.
2. Who is and what are the roles of a DBA.
3. Data breaches that shook the world.
