Re: How much OT/holidays do dba's work?

CindySR wrote: >When working in a 24 hours X 7 days/week shop, how often do DBAs end up working >weekends and/or holidays? Is this for database reorganization, upgrades, ...? >Thanks for the info. If it's a *true* 24x7 shop, then the machine just hums away literally ALL THE TIME and the DBA team just sits and watches it. Don't laugh, I've been to more than one site where that was an "absolute" customer requirement. In practice, DBAs work whenever they system dictates that they have to. Whenever it goes down--the DBA is there. If the DBA can schedule downtime to suit his personal schedule then that's fine, but it often happens that someone else will determine a time. The best example I had was a 24x7 factory where the mill hardware was down often enough to allow for the DBA team to do their work without IS being the cause of the outage. Two days that were always on the schedule were the 4th of July and over Thanksgiving, however. The schedule is comletely dependent on the system being served. You can find out more about being a DBA in Joe Lumbley's wonderfully readable book "Informix Database Administrator's Survival Guide" from Prentice Hall. (ISBN 0-13-124314-4) Though it is about the Online v5 generation, the real meat of the book is timeless. I carry a copy with me at all times... (Well, almost.) _____________________________________________________________ Clem Akins (aka clem@informix.com) Menlo Park x5937 Customer Course Development Manager Informix Software, Inc Last seen: Picnicking on the beach at Point Reyes, California