Hello,

First of all, thanks for your prompt responses.  
The impression that I got from your emails is that Oracle DBAs,
or DBAs in general for that matter, tend to work long hours and may have
to do some overtime from time to time.  Could I know what kind of hours
you work and how often you do overtime?  Also, is your day very work
intensive on average or do you find yourself without doing anything from
time to time?  

The reason why I'm asking this is because, although I like databases, I
wouldn't want to sacrifice my time and my family too much.

Thanks again for your time,
A_H

In that case you shouldn't try to become a DBA, especially not for
consultancy firms, where usually you'r only task is to cleanout customer
provided messes.
I am currently at a customer, and I am troubleshooting about 50 percent of
my time (currently 32 hours because in January I collapsed). If you are a
DBA, an emergency is an emergency, period.

Regards,

Sybrand Bakker, Oracle DBA

WOW - Interesting question.

In general I would say the following:

- The better you are at being a DBA the less overtime \ long hours \
intensive work.

- To be a better DBA, the more study, home experimenting, reading trail
and error, etc... you need to do

- Intensive? Well when your DB or server is down or corrupt and your
24x7 E-somedarnthing, general ledger, accounting system, etc... is dead.
Well ... lets just say that a LOT of people are VERY interested in your
every move.

- I (and everyone on my team) averages reading about 30-40 books per
year and lord knows how many whitepapers, etc.... Most of this is done
at home. Last year I hit 39 books cover to cover.

- My team of 4 DBAs supports 60+ oracle instances, 18 MSSQL serves and a
dozen or so Sybase boxes on Unix and NT. We probably average about 45-55
hours per week. However there are streatches where I have pulled 80-90+
hours per week several weeks in a row.

- Many items a DBA must do just have to be done after normal working
hours and weekends. Our company does a good job of allowing us to be
flexible. Ie - If you do a bunch of late night or weekend work, you get
few early days or late arrivals sometime else.

Bottome Line (My Opinion) DBAs and SAs have to be prepared to do a TON
of long hours, after hours and overtime. More so than most other
specialties in the IT profession. It all depends on your company, the
size and number if DBs, the number of systems, etc..... The $$$ can be
nice, but they don't come that way for nothing.

HTH........

--
Doug Coan
Oracle Certified Professional DBA

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Before you buy.

Find myself without anything to do?  For a few days about every 3 or 4
years!

As said before the hours you work depend on several things - company
atmosphere, co-workers, environment, etc.  I typically work about 45 -
50 hours a week.  It is true that a fair amount of work has to be done
outside "normal" working hours.  My company balances for that so it
isn't too big of a deal.  Another thing that makes my situation less
intense is that there are 4 of us doing project dba work as well as
covering the production systems.  This gives us a reasonable amount of
depth so that we're only on-call for a week out of the month and because
of the work we've done to stabilize things on-call isn't usually too
bad.  There are nights where I get paged 3 or 4 times during the night
and have to get up, dial in, and fix problems.  Those are incredibly
rare and when they happen my wife threatens to move in with her parents.
 Like I said, that's only once every couple of months ... but it does
happen.

I am very committed to put my family first and I think I've been able to
do that over the past number of years.

Geoffrey

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Before you buy.

Sybrand
Agree with you...
There are less demanding environments, but the $$ is less.
The guy never really did state why he was looking to change professions.

You collapsed in January?  HS, you need to take it easy!!!!