{"id":1737,"date":"2016-05-07T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-07T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/?p=1737"},"modified":"2016-05-07T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-07T12:00:00","slug":"moving-sideways","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/07\/moving-sideways\/","title":{"rendered":"Moving Sideways"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>The past two years have seen a lot of change in my life :-<span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span>I moved to Singapore thinking it would be for a year or two at least and is now looking like it will be longer.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span><\/span><span>I started my first role as a permanent employee of someone else&#8217;s organisation for the first time in around 22 years. (This was the one that most blew away those who know me well!)<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span><\/span><span>I went back to being a Production DBA, having worked on general Oracle performance and development with dev teams over my 5 years of different contracts at UBS.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span><\/span><span>Pretty soon, I was heading up the Level 3 Production DBA team and doing less and less technical work because of the long list of other things I had to take care of.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span><\/span><span>I only did it out of necessity (it was what the organisation needed at the time) but I started finding myself enjoying those new things more than I expected.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><\/span><\/div>\n<div> <\/div>\n<div>The last point is the main reason that I\u2019ve been blogging less, not presenting so much at conferences and not engaging in any technical conversations outside of work. (However, there were still lots of them with smaller groups in the workplace, believe me! Even the &#8216;blog posts&#8217; were replaced by very long internal emails.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div> <\/div>\n<div>Ultimately that lead to me realising there\u2019s little point me continuing as an Oracle ACE Director because it focuses on community contribution and, apart from helping to set up three sets of Singapore Oracle Sessions, I haven\u2019t really been contributing. I\u2019d already given up the Oak Table membership last year and always intended to give up the ACED too, but just hadn\u2019t got round to it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div> <\/div>\n<div>Having achieved a *lot* in my last role and working with a great team of people, I realised that the bits of it that I truly enjoyed have changed completely.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div> <\/div>\n<div>It\u2019s true that my favourite work of all might be looking at and resolving Oracle performance issues on Production systems or even just explaining them, but that\u2019s only a percentage of DBA work and particularly a team lead. Over time, I found that plenty of other people on the team could do the technical work (maybe not as well when it came to the performance stuff &#128521;) but what it seems I\u2019m really skilled at (and I suspect that this is at least slightly related to age, maturity and experience) is <em>fixing problems with processes and helping people<\/em>. It feels the same to me \u2013 something\u2019s broken that needs to be fixed \u2013 but means dealing with people more and dealing with a wider scope of problem. As a DBA you should always be spending most of your time dealing with people as a key part of the job, but *just* dealing with people to the extent that you don&#8217;t log in to hosts any more is another step on (or, as the post title says, moving sideways).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div> <\/div>\n<div>When I recently had a choice between moving even more into process and people management or moving back to a much more technical and strategic architecture role, I plumped for the one that only those closest to me would have imagined! Which of my peers would deliberately choose to refine change management processes or be on Production incidents in the middle of the night when they could be defining a banks database architecture in a nice cushy day job with lots of conference trips?!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div> <\/div>\n<div>Although the new role will be an extension of the old one, it&#8217;s still a pretty big step \u2013 first time in 26 years or so working in a role which has nothing to do with Oracle! But I\u2019m very excited about it and don\u2019t dread missing Oracle at all. I can always come back to it if this doesn\u2019t work out. I don&#8217;t think being up to date on what additional parameters there are in 12c has been my forte for a while now!<\/div>\n<div> <\/div>\n<div>My new job will be pretty wide-ranging and if I were to explain it completely it would not only be professionally inappropriate but I suspect aspects of it would convince people I&#8217;ve gone mad or am having a mid-life crisis! However, one aspect that actually drew me towards it and would send most of my peers running for the hills is that I will be a Situation Manager (one of a small team) on Major Incidents. In my most recent role, I found myself constantly helping with the incident management parts while the real DBAs did the work \u2013 each of us doing what we were best at. Imagine having that in your home at all hours of the day and night and yet Mads reaction was &#8211; &#8216;you love doing that, don&#8217;t you?&#8217;. Bless her &#128521;<\/p>\n<p>It turns out that I\u2019m pretty OK at cajoling, organising and perhaps speaking slightly loudly at people during high pressure situations. Maybe it&#8217;s growing up with an RAF Sergeant as a father or maybe, just maybe &#8230;<\/p><\/div>\n<div> <\/div>\n<div>I like to think of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ZfwgmEn4oUc\">Mr. Wolf<\/a> as the ultimate Situation Manager. <\/p>\n<p>At least that model works well for me in *my* head &#128521;<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The past two years have seen a lot of change in my life :- I moved to Singapore thinking it would be for a year or two at least and is now looking like it will be longer. I started my first role as a permanent employee of someone else&#8217;s organisation for the first time&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/07\/moving-sideways\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Moving Sideways<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1028,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2006\/07\/20\/whats-a-development-dba\/","url_meta":{"origin":1737,"position":0},"title":"What&#8217;s a &#8216;Development DBA&#8217;?","date":"July 20, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"I theory, this should be a much more straightforward, less contentious question than my previous - 'What's a Data Warehouse DBA?'A development DBA looks after the development (and test) databases. It truly is as simple as that, but depends on the nature of the project you're working on and the\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 2 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1011,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2006\/07\/04\/whats-a-data-warehouse-dba\/","url_meta":{"origin":1737,"position":1},"title":"What&#8217;s a &#8216;Data Warehouse DBA&#8217;?","date":"July 4, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"I've seen that question asked often in forums and mail groups. It's easy to understand why there's so much confusion because, for most DBAs, if you've seen one database, you've seen them all. Or rather, you haven't seen any of them. What I mean is that every database that lands\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 14 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":948,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2005\/08\/22\/i-love-this-site\/","url_meta":{"origin":1737,"position":2},"title":"I *love* this site!","date":"August 22, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"http:\/\/angrydba.com\/There's more to it than meets the eye and the purpose it serves depends what mood I'm in ...1) Reminds me of the worst aspects of some DBAs I still come across. I'll be able to point them to this from now on so that they can see how things\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 2 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":894,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2005\/12\/13\/in-praise-of-good-trainers\/","url_meta":{"origin":1737,"position":3},"title":"In Praise of Good Trainers","date":"December 13, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been thinking about training versus DBA work recently since it's been a while since I did any training work. I noticed an entry on Chris Foot's blog that mentions training which got me thinking even more.There was a time in the late 90s when recruitment agencies would look at\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 6 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1191,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2007\/01\/27\/dba-documentation-catalogue\/","url_meta":{"origin":1737,"position":4},"title":"DBA Documentation &#8211; Catalogue","date":"January 27, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Prompted by Linda's comment on a previous blog, I thought it might be worth writing a couple of postings on DBA documentation.The first thing you need is a Database Catalogue of some kind.Benefits1) Even an experienced DBA arriving on site won't know what servers exist, how to login to them,\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 11 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":895,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2005\/12\/07\/oracle-enterprise-manager-10gr2\/","url_meta":{"origin":1737,"position":5},"title":"Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR2","date":"December 7, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"First of all, let me be clear that I'm not a fan of GUI tools. That's not based on a misguided macho opinion that somehow you need to be able to struggle with a command line interface to prove that you're a good DBA but because :- I'm a contractor\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 9 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1737\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}