| Detail | For this role |
|---|---|
| Department | Information Technology |
| Level | Mid level |
| Reports to | Infrastructure Manager |
| Direct reports | None |
| Experience | 3 to 7 years administering production databases |
Database Administrator job description template
Copy this job description, replace the text in square brackets and post it on your careers page or a job portal.
Job title: Database Administrator
Department: Information Technology
Reports to: Infrastructure Manager
Location: [City], [office, branch or site]
About the role
A Database Administrator keeps the company's databases available, fast, secure and recoverable. They install and upgrade database servers, manage backups and restores, tune slow queries, control user access, run replication or high availability setups and plan storage growth for Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL or PostgreSQL. DBAs usually report to the infrastructure manager or the head of IT infrastructure. A good DBA never loses data, spots trouble in the metrics before users feel it and can restore any database to a point in time on request.
Key responsibilities
- Install, configure and upgrade Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL or PostgreSQL servers to company standards.
- Schedule full, differential and log backups, verify them daily and run restore drills every month.
- Set up and monitor replication, Always On, Data Guard or clustering for high availability and disaster recovery.
- Find slow queries through execution plans and wait statistics, and tune indexes, statistics and settings with developers.
- Create database users and roles with least-privilege access, and remove access for leavers and ended projects.
- Monitor space, growth, locks, blocking and error logs, and act before storage or sessions run out.
- Apply database patches and security updates in agreed maintenance windows, with a rollback plan for each.
- Review schema changes and migration scripts from developers before they run in production.
- Encrypt sensitive data, enable auditing and give auditors the evidence they need.
- Document the database inventory, configurations and runbooks for routine tasks and failovers.
Requirements
- B.Tech or B.E. in Computer Science or IT, or a BCA or MCA
- Oracle Certified Professional, Azure Database Administrator Associate or a PostgreSQL certification is an advantage
- 3 to 7 years administering production databases
KRAs and KPIs for a Database Administrator
Key result areas for the appraisal form, each with a KPI you can measure every month or quarter.
| Key result area | How to measure it |
|---|---|
| Data protection | Zero data loss events, with every backup verified and the monthly restore drill passed |
| Availability | Production database availability of at least 99.9 percent each month |
| Query performance | Top 10 slow queries reviewed every week, with agreed fixes deployed within the sprint |
| Recovery objectives | Failover and point-in-time restore meet the agreed RTO and RPO in every quarterly drill |
| Access control | Database access reviewed quarterly, with leaver accounts removed within 1 working day |
| Change safety | No production incident caused by an unreviewed schema change |
Skills and tools
Tools used day to day: Oracle Enterprise Manager or SQL Server Management Studio, RMAN or native backup tools, pgAdmin or MySQL Workbench, Percona Toolkit, Grafana or SolarWinds DPA, Linux shell.
Reporting line and career path
Next roles: Data Architect, Infrastructure Manager, Site Reliability Engineer
Interview questions for a Database Administrator
- A developer ran a DELETE without a WHERE clause on production an hour ago. How do you recover?
- Explain the difference between full, differential and transaction log backups.
- A query that took 2 seconds now takes 2 minutes. How do you find out why?
- How would you set up high availability for a PostgreSQL database?
- What checks do you run before approving a schema change for production?
- How do you give developers read access to production data safely?
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What does a database administrator do?
A database administrator keeps databases available, fast, secure and recoverable. They install and upgrade database servers, run and test backups, set up replication and high availability, tune slow queries, manage user access, apply patches and review schema changes before they reach production. Their first duty is protecting data.
What is the difference between a DBA and a SQL developer?
A SQL developer writes queries, stored procedures, views and reports for applications and analysts. A DBA looks after the database servers themselves: backups, performance, availability, security and upgrades. SQL developers build on the database while DBAs keep it healthy, and many DBAs begin their careers as SQL developers.
Which database skills do DBAs need in India?
Oracle and SQL Server remain common in banks, insurers and large enterprises, while MySQL and PostgreSQL are more common in startups and product companies. Managed cloud databases such as Amazon RDS and Azure SQL are increasingly part of the job. Strong backup, recovery and tuning skills carry across all of them.