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Message: <blockquote data-quote="der_kluge" data-source="post: 2718735" data-attributes="member: 945">I'm not a DBA, and have no desire to be one, but I've worked with many, many DBAs in my career.First, the good news. DBAs can make good money. If you get a chance to become an Oracle DBA, you will always have a job, and opportunities will always be available. Good Teradata DBAs can easily make $120k per year. It's not uncommon for the really good ones with lots of certifications to make that much.Which leads me to the first point - you want to get certified. Getting certified for whichever RDBMS you use is a really good idea. You'll stand a much better chance at landing good jobs if you're certified.Be aware that a DBA job is not always an easy one, and it's usually always a thankless one. DBAs get paged at 3 o'clock in the morning when the database crashes, and sometimes these crashes can be very difficult to solve. Often a DBA will find themselves on long, very painful conference calls with upper management and clients who wonder why their applications aren't working.Also, the career path of a DBA is a dead-end one. As a DBA, you can expect to be a DBA, and then maybe a senior DBA. If you're lucky, maybe you could even become a manager over a team of DBAs, but don't bet on that. And that's about it.I've never heard of anyone being an Access DBA. Most programmers take care of those functions themselves. There are SQL Server DBAs. In fact I know one. That's a perfectly viable career choice. A still better career choice is the career path I chose - systems analysis or data modeling. Here, you work on the front end of a project, and you work on new projects all the time. Data analysts gather requirements and build brand new databases. Once they are installed, they might make a few changes here or there, but they rarely if ever get paged at 3 in the morning, and most don't carry pagers. Data analysts aren't as common as DBAs, but they tend to get more respect in an organization, and the career path is a little more broad. So, I hope that gives you something to think about.  Being a DBA is a great career choice, and if you love it - great.  It's not for everyone.</blockquote>

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