The Key Responsibilities of a Database Administrator

A database administrator's (DBA) primary responsibility is to ensure that data is available, protected from loss and corruption, and easily accessible as needed. The responsibilities that make up the day-to-day work of a DBA are

• Software installation and Maintenance
• Data Extraction, Transformation, and Loading
• Specialized Data Handling
• Database Backup and Recovery
• Security
• Authentication
• Capacity Planning
• Performance Monitoring
• Database Tuning
• Trouble shooting

The key responsibilities of Database designers are

• Identifying the data to be stored in the data-base and for choosing appropriate structures to represent and store this data.
• It is the responsibility of database designers to communicate with all prospective database users in order to understand their requirements and to create a design that meets these requirements.
• In many cases, the designers are on the staff of the DBA and may be assigned other staff responsibilities after the database design is completed.
• Database designers typically interact with each potential group of users and develop views of the database that meet the data and processing requirements of these groups. Each view is then analyzed and integrated with the views of other user groups.
• The final database design must be capable of supporting the requirements of all user groups.