Just as the medical profession has segmented into specialty areas because of its complexity, Oracle DBAs are also segmenting themselves into specialty areas, targeting Oracle DBA niche markets such as data warehousing, performance tuning, and Oracle applications support. It's very hard to find an experienced Oracle DBA general practitioner. Companies are struggling to attract DBA talent with enough experience to ensure continuous availability of their databases. The downtime for many production databases is often measured in tens of thousand of dollars per minute, and it is very risky to entrust these databases to beginners. Since many companies have been unable to attract DBA talent, several approaches have been tried to fill the market need.
Some companies undertake to educate an intelligent junior employee in database administration.
The drawback is that the company often loses these new DBAs as soon as they're trained because their HR departments are unable or unwilling to increase the DBA's salary to the market rate. Hence, most of these DBAs leave their companies soon after completing their training. Remote DBA services Many companies are abandoning full-time employee DBAs in favor of remote Oracle support. Companies are saving tens of thousands of dollars yearly by replacing expensive full-time DBAs with remote DBA services. These services hire a pool of highly trained certified DBAs and place them in response centers where they can constantly monitor client databases.