Comments on: Working at Pythian: 3 Months In

By: Sathish

Sathish — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 02:18:00 +0000

Question about India office..

Are the DBA’s in the India office only used for on call support?

By: Alex Gorbachev

Alex Gorbachev — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:07:06 +0000

I feel that there is a basic functional difference between managing SQL Server, and managing MySQL or Oracle. The time needed to maintain a single instance is less, because most functions are very simple, but the number of times that action is required is more frequent.

As Ron says – SQL Server is easy – “try left click… doesn’t work – than it’s right click… in the exceptional cases double-click”. But man the fingers must hurt!

Sorry – couldn’t resist! ;-)

By: paulm

paulm — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:33:05 +0000

I can weigh in at least on the paging front. I have been with Pythian for almost 2 years doing evening oncall work.

Andrey and myself take evening (for Nth America) oncall. We are based in Sydney, Australia which is GMT+10 or GMT+11 depending on daylight savings.

I take the whole range of clients, using Oracle, Microsoft SQL server and MySQL databases. Andrey handles Oracle based clients.

The times that I get multiple pages at once happens on a regular basis. You just get good at triaging the issues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triage
As Babette said, you become an “Enlightened” DBA. You prioritize the important stuff and the less important stuff can wait.

Whilst Andrey and I normally handle most of the work. As I mentioned in a old blog post here, we can call on any Pythian DBA, so if we need a specific DBA or specialist we can ask them to come online and help out.

My role is much different to your average Ottawa based DBA. Most DBAs only take oncall pager for either a week straight (during their day only) or one day per week
and one weekend per month.

Have Fun
Paul

By: Tim Procter

Tim Procter — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:00:00 +0000

To offer a second perspective, I’ve worked at Pythian for nearing 3 years now, primarily in the MS SQL team. I agree with what Sheeri states as the pros. We tend to get a lot more pages on our team though: 3 pages a weekend would be a dream. A typical weekend for us will yield closer to 30 distinct pages (and numerous recurring ones). It’s not a question of whether you will get paged, but of whether there will be any uninterrupted periods of sleep.

Yes, sometimes the pages come in at the same time. It’s a judgment call then, we try to prioritize the pages, and if more then one are real emergencies demanding attention, then hopefully we can find someone else available to help out.

Maybe I’ll say more on that in my own blog some time.

By: Artem Russakovskii

Artem Russakovskii — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:34:28 +0000

What happens when you get 2 or more calls at the same time at night? Do you queue them up in your own internal queue, start working on them at the same time (eek!), or call someone else for help? If it’s the first case, how do you explain to the client that you’re busy doing other stuff?

By: Ronald Bradford

Ronald Bradford — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 01:36:38 +0000

congratulations, it doesn’t take long for 3 months to come along.

It’s very important that all employees are motivated to make the environment, location and work the best possible and it’s great to hear it starts from the top with Paul. This is really necessary for a work place where you want to go to work each day.

Ronald

By: Sheeri Cabral

Sheeri Cabral — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:37:24 +0000

Frank, that’s a great question, I should have clarified. I’d say there are 2-3 paging issues per weekend, and perhaps 1-2 per evening, but the evening ones I rarely have to deal with as we have coverage in Australia and India for those, and those folks take oncall during their days, which equate to our nights.

By: Frank

Frank — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:42:58 +0000

Sheeri,

Just for curiosity, when you say “pretty much guaranteed to be paged” what do you really mean? How many calls per night?
In one of my previous DBA jobs normal on-call week were: 2-3 phone calls during the weeks and 3-5 calls during the weekend (“horror” ones were 10 calls scatterd during week nights and more than 10 during the weekends).

Regards