Definition
A database administrator (DBA) is a person with the overall responsibility to manage a database installation. The typical tasks performed by a DBA are database installation, configuration, performance monitoring, security and privacy management, backup and recovery, and database migration when needed. DBA uses a number of database configuration, tuning, and monitoring tools to achieve these tasks. It may be more appropriate to consider DBA as a “role” rather than a single person, as these tasks might be shared among multiple individuals.
Historical Background
Early database installations were reasonably small, and the DBMS software was relatively simple that end users could easily perform the tasks of a DBA. However, the size and complexity of these installations quickly grew as more applications were ported to database systems, while, at the same time, the DBMSs started providing rich feature sets. Managing this became a specialized job that now requires significant...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Recommended Reading
Elmasri R, Navathe S. Fundamentals of database systems, 7th ed. Pearson; 2016.
Silberschatz A, Korth HF, Sudarshan S. Database system concepts, 6th ed. McGraw-Hill; 2010.
Ramakrishnan R, Gehrke J. Database management systems, 3rd ed. McGraw-Hill; 2002.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this entry
Cite this entry
Özsu, M.T. (2018). Database Administrator (DBA). In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_80652
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_80652
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-8266-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-8265-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering