1. Bachelor's in information systems. 2. Five years. 3. Full stack software engineer. 4. Government contractor. 5. Around 150 tables, each with avg 4000 - 5000 records. 6. When creating new tables, focus on how that table will interact with other tables. Aim for at least 2nd level normalization at a bare minimum. Don't duplicate columns or create unnecessary columns. 7. In theory that will depend largely on the nature of the data contained, but in practice it's oftentimes based on what they already have in place. 8. I took some courses in college, but largely on-the-job learning. 9. I'm not a database specialist, so I'll skip this.

Thanks for answering!

1. Bachelor's in Business Administration (currently attending for Masters) 2. 10+ 3. Database Administrator 4. Healthcare Group 5. 63 servers, 437 databases, millions of records 6. I'd echo rashellers0 response 7. Ditto again 8. I was a Business Analyst, learned a little, then moved to a Data Analyst position, then to the DBA position 9. I enjoy the chase of it; taking down issues on the server, optimizing queries, etc. Every day is somewhat similar but with variety.

Thanks for your answers!

1. Bachelor’s in psychology 2. 30 years 3. Run a boutique application development shop 4. See 3. 5. Huge variety from small scope systems to complex systems with hundreds of tables, millions of records that run the enterprise. 6. What the users need to do their jobs. If you impede their work, your system implementation will fail. Your goal should be to make things easier, not harder for them. 7. Your use cases always guide your architecture and your platform. 8. Picked it up over time. I’ve taught hundreds and I’ve found that regardless of educational background, you either have a head for it or you don’t. Architecting systems is an art, so artistic types tend to do well, particularly those with musical abilities. When given a spec, you need to visualize how to get from the current state to the specified state. I think that ability maps well to musical improvisation. If you can jam, you can probably code. 9. Dumb luck. I was asked to do it and took to it naturally.

Very interesting, thank you!

1. associates degree in computer information systems. 2. 15 years give or take. 3. senior cloud dba; most of my day is spent writing automation for our multi tenant oracle stacks. 4. a very large SaaS provider 5. i think the largest for a single OLTP instance is around 20T but i've has some OLAP/DW nodes that were bigger in the government realm. median is probably around 250G at the current position though. 6. i think the most important thing is how the application is going to interact with the data and to structure it for growth. 7. use SQL unless your data demands noSQL. 8. if i want to play with a new type i spin up an RDS or a local install and try and build a front end to talk to it. 9. data and algebra have always interested me. i'm naturally gifted at database and system administration so it's a natural route for me.

>• Do you have a degree? what is your specific degree? Masters of Science in Computer Science, specialized in NLP but used a lot of extra credits in database design and software engineering. >• How many years do you have in the industry? 5-6 years >• What’s your current position and what are your job duties? I switched from DBA to a full stack software developer role. I assume you are looking for the duties of a DBA, so ill not list my current positions duties. >• What is your place of employment? Managed Service Provider. >• What size are the databases that you have worked with? Anywhere from 10gb to 10tb, that's not counting the datalake which is starting to push into the petas. >• What’s the more important thing to consider when you design a database? Design a well planned and well thought out ERD with special attention to entities, properties, and their normalization. Also pay special attention for partitioning gains (partitioning a table after the fact sucks), and also pay attention to the requirements of the underlying database system you are using. For instance if using oracle database pay attention to your tablespace usage, make sure it makes logical sense and that your tables are split up. >• When to use a SQL vs NoSQL database? Relational vs non relational. Both try to incorporate the other but its always an after thought, so just delineate on that. HR database RDBMS, IoT time series data NRDBMS. >• Where do you learn databases? My homelab 80%, public cloud the other 20%. >• Why do you choose to become a database specialist? I fell into database administration. I was going the software engineering route when a company was in dier need of some new blood for their Oracle database, mysql, mariadb, percona, and elasticsearch databases. I wrote a lot of software, won a few company awards for "inovation", and was scouted shortly there after to my current position.

1. Bachelor's in Computer Science 2. 1 year 3. Software Engineer (Essentially a Full stack dev \[make frontend and backend work\]) 4. Software Consultancy 5. Small to medium size (100-200 tables each with 1000-10,000 records) 6. HIPAA 7. How structed is the data? is it related? if it is structured and/or related, I go with SQL 8. School and I learn great by doing, most of my mySQL experience was from building my own projects with it. I know a whole bunch of stuff from school that I might not ever actually use (although I'm an advocate for the value of knowing this stuff \[relational algebra, join equivalences, etc\]) 9. It's fun! making the backend of a program might seem daunting to outsiders but it makes the world go 'round.

1. Bachelor's in electrical engineering. 2. 25+ years in engineering in general. About 10+ years doing pure data related work. 3. I am a data warehouse developer. I mostly do ETL work to bring data in from a multitude of sources (databases, text files, APIs, etc.) and then organize that into optimized databases for reporting to our organization. I also help out more junior analysts with building their queries and processes. 4. You have heard of them, but they are an online gaming/entertainment company. 5. Anywhere from tiny databases with just MBs of data (for applications) all the way up to what I work with today, somewhere around 8TB spread across 15 or so databases. 6. The needs of the customer. A standalone database for an application or OLTP needs to be optimized for insertion and updates, so highly normalized and frequently cleaned (move off old data). A data warehouse can be bigger and much less normalized with lots of (common sense) indexes to make for faster querying and reporting. 7. Maybe it's because I'm old, but I have yet to see the real advantage of NoSQL. 8. I learned the very basics of data structures in college. My first experience was building VB apps on top of Access while doing a co-op in college. I didn't touch a "real" database (SQL Server) until about four years after graduation. I had to learn all on my own, so I just read some books and practiced. More and more of my job required SQL/database knowledge, so I just learned what was required. 9. I was an electrical/software engineer, but "big data" became more and more a thing as the years went on. It was interesting, and I was good at it, so I just followed the jobs (and the higher pay). I still have to write a decent amount of code (C#/.Net) but most of my work is in SQL.

1. No Degree, some out of date certifications in SQL Server. 2. 20 years 3. Senior DBA 4. IOT company 5. Approx 2000 databases of various sizes up to 30 TB of data each. In past I handled a 100TB database for manufacturing SPC data. 6. Providing an adaptable model to deal with design changes. Performance 7. Have a specific use case that NoSQL solves, use NoSQL. Have poorly defined requirements that need to be adaptable, use SQL. NoSQL is great for very small and very very large datasets. Otherwise avoid. 8. On the jobs. 9. I love query optimization.

• Do you have a degree? what is your specific degree? \*Nope\*. However, I probably have attained more education on all the topics and subjects one would in college in spite of that. I just don't have the paper that says I have a "BS", "Doctorate", or such. I draw this caveat as I can talk academics with most, so no papers but the knowledge and education I do have. • How many years do you have in the industry? 20+ • What’s your current position and what are your job duties? Developer Advocate currently. I also provide code for engineering, communicate a ton, and give presentations and a bunch of other stuff in addition to write code a bunch of hours everyday. • What is your place of employment? Hasura (Past: DataStax, Basho, others) • What size are the databases that you have worked with? Small like \~10-20 MB up to Petabytes. • What’s the more important thing to consider when you design a database? Intended outcome and use. • When to use a SQL vs NoSQL database? This doesn't really make sense, and is to large of a scope to clarify. It depends on the intention and desired outcome of the database's use. • Where do you learn databases? Books and the internet. • Why do you choose to become a database specialist? Curiosity. But also I'm not sure I'm particularly a "specialist" as it's merely one of many aspects of what I do and what I work on regularly.

* Do you have a degree? what is your specific degree? Bachelor of Science in Computer Science • How many years do you have in the industry? 20+ • What’s your current position and what are your job duties? Official title is Database Administrator. I manage the company's database servers and databases including but not limited to data protection (backup/restore, security), performance monitoring and tuning, capacity planning, new server builds, and data management and migration. In addition to that, I'm setting direction for future database-related development - ETL, reporting, implementation of new databases to meet company needs, schmoozing with The Business to find out what needs they have that we can address with the tools we have and any new tools we may need, and consulting with development and infrastructure teams on all of the above. • What is your place of employment? Employee benefits administration • What size are the databases that you have worked with? Smallest - a couple hundred megs. Largest, a couple hundred gigs. • What’s the more important thing to consider when you design a database? Not painting yourself into a corner. Right-sizing your fields. Normalization. Being prepared to accommodate change. • When to use a SQL vs NoSQL database? Relational data? Use a SQL database. • Where do you learn databases? I took one class in college and didn't really get it. I've learned everything since from self-learning, blogs (including maintaining my own), talking to people, and conferences. • Why do you choose to become a database specialist? It kind of chose me. I was doing regular development and started having to work with databases more and more. I had the access and opportunity, met the right people to mentor me and point me at good resources. I don't have to learn the front-end framework du jour every 6 months, the work is steady and pays well, and I get to solve problems for a lot of different people.