What you say, and Inside the mind of a DBA what your DBA hears: An Oracle DBA lives and dies by the performance and availability of enterprise Storage Admin says: With the data. The DBA guards data as a lioness guards her cubs. Anything that threatens current storage infrastructure, the smooth functioning of an Oracle DBA’s systems is to be treated with extreme I can’t support RAID 10. We just prejudice. Unfortunately, that sometimes includes the storage infrastructure and the don’t have enough capacity. people who manage it. Only the very best will do for an Oracle database – RAID DBA hears: You are an enemy 10, sub millisecond response time, oceans of capacity – these are a few of a DBA’s of efficient data management. favorite things. If high availability and performance are bacon and Bon Jovi (things you love) then Storage Admin says: To downtime and high latency are Brussels sprouts and waiting in line at the post office – support your IOPS and latency to be eliminated at all cost. requirements, we are going to While you would love to shower them with flash cache, short-stroked LUNs, and need performance HDD’s and snapshots – you can’t because that is way too expensive. And they just don’t cache. We don’t have the budget understand that trade-off. this quarter. What’s more, DBAs view your storage maintenance windows with suspicion. DBA hears: I am over- They remember that time in 2011 when the maintenance window spilled over into complicating your simple production hours due to a faulty .config file. request for a moderate amount of performance storage, u i m d e m despite the fact that you fund much of my storage budget. h i Storage Admin says: We have IT w gh a storage maintenance window ol next week. Unfortunately we may have to bring down the DB Performance database for a couple of hours. DBA hears: ALERT! CODE RED! Shoot first, ask questions later. They remember 2011 because nothing is worse than the database being down – and the CIO suddenly knows their name as “that guy responsible for the outage.”