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A Study of DBA (Data Base Administrator) Job Awareness among Saudi Female
IT Professionals

Conference Paper · March 2014

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 ICBASS-5487
A Study of DBA (Data Base Administrator) Job Awareness among Saudi
Female IT Professionals

Ahsan Abdullah, Eman Alharbi and Noha Alsulami

Faculty of Computing and Information Technology
King Abdulaziz University
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
E-mail: ahsan1010@yahoo.com

Abstract
As the level of computerization increases, and as more and more organizations make their
applications web enabled, the requirement for Data Base Administrators (DBA)s is likely to
increase. DBA is the super-user of the company‘s information and data assets, and
traditionally this job has been occupied by men. However, with the increase in enrollment of
Saudi girls in higher education and higher literacy rate, the gender demographics for this
demanding job may change. When the primary author of this paper conducted a graduate
level course in DBA, among 16 students, 13 were girls. This led to the idea of exploring DBA
job awareness among Saudi IT professionals. For this purpose, we used a web-based survey.
The link and invitation for the survey was sent through email and social communications sites
and was filled by 30 respondents, mostly females from the Kingdom. We found that 43% of
the respondents were aware of the job market of DBAs but were not aware of the challenges,
and those who wanted to be a DBA had more professional experience as compared to the
other respondents.

Keywords—DBA, gender, awareness, culture, education

I. Introduction
Today most of the operations in medium to large organizations have a database management
system (DBMS) running the operations managing the data. DBMS is software that can create,
update, retrieve and store data in database to enable application programmers or end users to
manage and share these data. There are different examples of DBMS including MySQL,
Microsoft Access, SQL Server and Oracle [1]. Database is an arranged collection of data. The
end user or application programmers can access this data by specifying the name of fields,
records, and files [2, 3]. Such organizations require database administration to ensure the
effective use and deployment of the company's databases. A DBA is the information
technician responsible for ensuring the ongoing operational functionality and efficiency of an
organization's databases and the applications that access those databases [2].

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The importance of DBA depends on the size of the organization. Larger organizations may
divide DBA responsibilities among a team of administrators, each with specific skills and
areas of responsibilities [4]. As the organization becomes larger and larger, the DB becomes
more complex and DBA will face some challenges in managing this huge amount of data.

We have conducted a web survey with 19 questions to gather data about DBA and DBA's
challenges (the survey questions are placed in appendix A). We got 30 responses from
students, IT professionals, computer science workers and general public. Each one of the
survey questions has been analyzed in order to find the relationship and the correlation
between them. The general challenges of DBA and the security as the biggest challenge of
DBA are discussed in the finding section. Security challenge has many threats which has
been discussed and handled through this research. In this paper we have discussed the
consideration of how to overcome the security challenge and make DB more secure.

II. Background of DBA

In this section, an overview of the DBA will be introduced. DBA is the person who is
responsible for managing the overall database environment. He performs a variety of tasks in
a variety of areas, which include DB designing, translating logical data form into physical
data form, controlling, implementing, performance tuning, maintaining, security, backups,
recovery and the use of DB [4].

DBA should have different skills which can be categorized into two groups; managerial and
technical skills. DBA as a manager manages personnel and interacts with end users. So he
must also possess skills like [5]: negotiation skills, coordination skills, analytical skills,
conflict resolution skills and communications skills including written and oral. In addition to
these, he must also have technical skills like [5]: operational skills (that includes security and
database implementation), broad understanding of DBMS's functions and programming
languages, knowledge of SDLC (Systems Development Life Cycle), knowledge of Database
Life Cycle and Database modeling and design skills.

DBA can use some tools to enhance the functionality of DBMS and to reduce the time and
effort of maintaining the system, for example: Data Designing and Modeling tools used in
translating the logical concept into physical one, generating the DDL automatically. Another
example is Database Auditing tool which helps in monitoring the data definition, data control,
and data integrity in the database environment [6].

There are many types of DBA based on various tasks in DBA job. Larger companies require
different types of DBAs, but smaller companies simply hire a DBA to perform all tasks.

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Some of the types of DBA are [2]: System DBA: his role focuses on the installation and
performance of the DBMS. The second type is Database Architect: He can design new
databases for existing or new applications. The third type is Data Modeler: He can collect and
analyze the data requirements for developed projects and design logical and conceptual data
models. The fourth type is Application DBA: His role focuses on design, continuous support
and administration of database for application, whether specific or not.

III. Related Work

In this section, we will mention previous researches about DBA salary, job market, the
challenges which he faces and the tasks which could be automated.

DBA salaries are among the highest base salaries in IT. ITCareerFinder reports that DBA
salaries have risen, on average 9.2% over the last two years. In 2011, the average starting
DBA salary ranged between $79,000 – $109,500, whereas in 2013 the range has risen to
$83,000 – $119,500. The hike in salary is due to skills and experience in addition to DBMS,
like: IBM DB2, Oracle and MS SQL [7]. DBAs are not as highly paid as some people think
but even if DBAs are not the highest paid IT professionals, the pay is still good and DBA is
still a great career choice.

DBA is the most challenging job in the IT field. The challenges which have been reported by
Craig s.Mullins [8] are: keeping databases synchronized and available at any time for any
authorized application, recovery from a database change that was incorrectly designed, or
backed off a migration to a prior point in time. In this case, the DBA must have knowledge of
the database environment both before and after the change or migration. Perhaps the biggest
challenge is to implement a successful disaster recovery plan. DBA has to be sure that there
is an updated disaster recovery plan. Another challenge for DBA is the setting up and
managing data authority and security, which needs technical experience. One more challenge
for DBA when managing metadata in a distributed DB, implementing and using repository
technology and keeping the repository up-to-date.

There are more challenges reported by Oracle [9], which are: Learning continuously while
there are new tools, features and Renewable user's requirements. Customization standard is
another challenge when redeveloping /customizing some DBMS component to perform
special tasks. The challenge of DBMS and SQL Performance tuning take a high score at
Oracle organization because the most important thing in any system is its ability to perform
the query as fast as possible.
Data Integrations was another challenge for DBA as the growth of the database, he has to
make sure of the data integrity all the time. Index selection is also a challenge because DBA

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should take care when selecting attributes for the index, the size of the indexed table, and the
priority of each index which should be recognized to enhance the optimizer [10].

There are many tasks of DBA that are automated to help DBA and save his time. Some of
these tasks as presented in articles, [11] present performance optimization as automated task
by providing automated physical design. Consequently the performance of database is
enhanced. [12] Provides index selection in DBMS as automated task by designing a tool to
extract frequent item sets from a given workload to compute an index configuration. So this
tool minimizes query processing. The study in [13] presents the index selection as automated
task of DBA by designing a new tool based on clustering technique. This tool helps a DBA to
choose a good group of indexes to execute queries. The last automated task is index selection
by designing technique that uses dynamic programming and FP-growth to enhance query
processing time under space limitation as presented in [10].

DBA job vacancies are advertised on websites, social media, employment agencies and
newspapers [3]. One of the websites that presents the opportunities of jobs for DBAs is
CNNMoney website that provides a list of the best hundred jobs in USA that are ranked
annually and have big growth and great pay. This website provides specific information about
this job including: the median pay was 87,200$, the top pay was 122,000$, the total jobs were
110,800 and the percentage of job growth in 10 years was 30.6%. In 2012, DBA job was in
the fifth rank, but this job was pushed to the fourteenth rank in 2013. Information is provided
about this job including: the median pay is 88,800$, the top pay is 123,000 $, the number of
total jobs is 110,800 and the percentage of job growth in 10 years is 30.6%. So, there is
little difference in the amount of top and median pays that are increased in 2013, but total
jobs and the percentage of job growth are the same.

There are different requirements for DBA job such as bachelor‘s degree in computer science
or information technology field, the experience is very important and some companies
require certification in Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or another application. Most business
companies moves towards using database, so there is huge request for DBAs. DBA‘s job also
requires long working hours on the computer especially when working on big projects. DBA
has to be prepared to work extra hours especially in disaster situations [14].

IV. Methodology
In this section we will discuss the method which is used to gather information about DBA.
An electronic survey was conducted with 19 questions. It includes several sections:
The first section included general information about the respondents (gender, age, and
country). The second section included their career information (student, major, dream job, IT

144
professional, years of experience, surfing time on: computer- net- phone). The third section
included some questions about DBA jobs (job market, salary, challenges, automated tasks,
biggest challenge for DBA) in order to gather feedback from 30 respondents from different
categories (students, teachers, IT professionals, public). This survey included several
sections. This study is based on the following survey questionnaire:

V. Survey Results
In this section we will review the analysis of survey results for each of the questions and find
the percentage of the respondents who answered these questions and make a comparison
between the findings by implying a graphical chart. This analysis is done by importing the
excel file into access DB and by using GROUP-BY query to find the data frequency, then
display the result of each question by using pie chart graph

1. Validation of survey results

To validate the survey results we check the correlation between the age of the respondents
and their experience. We found that there is a noticeable correlation between the age and
experience (years) of IT professionals, because the correlation being 0.6252 and R2 value
being 0.390 as shown in Figure-1. So there is a linear relation between these questions. This
relationship is a natural product as long as the person gets older; his years of experience will
be increase.

145
2. What is your gender?
The gender question for our respondents is showed in Figure-2. This figure represents 17%
of respondents are male while 83% are female. The conclusion of this question is that most
respondents who answered this survey are females.

3. What is your age?

Most of those who returned us the questionnaire were aged between 18 -30 years, they got a
percent of 67%, while the number of those who were of age over 30 years got a percent of
30%. The lowest percentage is 3% for our respondents whose average age is under 18 years.
The conclusion of this question is that the samples which were used to conduct our case study
are ones whose age is between 18- 24 & over 30. So we will focus on these two categories in
this study. Figure 2 shows the age of our respondents.

146
4. Are you an IT professional? How many years of experience?
One of our categories is IT professional. It represents 27%, while 73% represents other
categories. The experience years of IT professionals, 14% represents those whom have the
average of experience between 5- 10 years. 10% of them who's the years of experience less
than 5 years and 3% of them whose the years of experience more than 10 years. The
conclusion of these questions is that the IT whom applied to this survey will improve our data
while they could have knowledge about the study domain. Figure-3 shows number of
respondents who are IT professionals, and Figure-7 shows their average experience in years.

5. Are you working in computer science domain?

This question used to determine if the respondents are aware of the DBA field or not, while
the CS working domain can help in this case. The findings indicate that 43% of them are
working in CS field and 57% are not. The conclusion of this question will assure the support
for this study because we have a high percentage of the people who are working in CS
domain.

6. Are you aware of the job market for DBAs?

The percentages of respondents who are aware and unaware about the job market for DBA
are equals. It represents 50% of our respondents as shown in Figure-4.

7. Are you aware of the salaries DBAs get?

The importance of this question lay on getting a rate how many of the respondents are aware
about the salary of the DBAs. 23% of respondents are aware of that, while 77% are unaware.

147
This is because most of the respondents are not IT or CS particular. This result is shown in
Figure-4.

8. Are you aware of the challenges of DBAs?

30% of respondents are aware of the challenges of DBAs, while 70% of them are unaware.
This is because most of our respondents are not IT or working in CS domain. This result is
shown in Figure-4.

9. What do you think is the biggest challenge of DBAs?

The percentage of most respondents, who do not know about the biggest challenge of DBA,
is 83%. While 10% reported "Security" as the biggest challenge, and 4% reported "gathering
the information". 3% reported "Losses of data, modification of database" as the biggest
challenge. These outcomes are support the reported challenges which already mentioned in
the related work section, so they are considered as the biggest challenges which can a DBA
got. Results are shown in the Figure-5.

10. Which DBA task you think can be automated?

87% of the respondents didn't know anything about the automated task of DBA. While 7%
reported "Backup and Restore" as the automated task, and 3% represents "processing of data
and Developing database periodically" as the automated tasks. Results are shown in the
Figure-6.

148
11. Do you want to be a DBA?
It seems that the DB administration is good choice for job while we got almost half of the
respondents who are want to be a DBA in the future, Figure-7 shows that 43% of respondents
want to be DBA, while 57% of them do not want to be DBAs.

12. Approximate number of hours per day you spend surfing the net?
The findings of this question indicate that 47 % of the respondents are spending from 3- 7
hours on net and 40% of them are using net less than 3 hours per day, this is very close ratio.
While only 13% of respondents are spending more than 7 hours during their use of net. The
conclusion is that most of people spend a reasonable time on using net. Figure-7 shows the
number of hours per day for using the net by the respondents. Observe that respondents who
want to be a DBA not only are more experienced, but also spend more time on the net, thus
they may be more aware of the market and potential DBA job opportunities.

149
 VI. Conclusions
DBA is the super-user of the company‘s information and data assets, and traditionally this job
has been occupied by men. However, with the increase in enrollment of Saudi girls in higher
education and higher literacy rate, the gender demographics for this demanding job may
change. When the third author of this paper conducted a graduate level course in DBA,
among 16 students, 13 were girls. This led to the idea of exploring DBA job awareness
among Saudi IT professionals. We found that 50% of the respondents were aware of the job
market of DBAs but were not aware of the challenges, and those who wanted to be a DBA
had more professional experience as compared to the other respondents. We also found that
respondents who want to be a DBA not only are more experienced, but also spend more time
on the net, thus we conclude that these respondents be more aware of the market and
potential DBA job opportunities.

VII. References
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