Database related career paths

Databases are related to everywhere. In this article, we will discus main duties, essential and preferred skills required and educational qualifications and finally, the most important thing you want to know; the salary about following database related roles.

• Database Administrator
• Database Designer
• Data Engineer
• Database Programmer
• Database Developer

Database Administrator

This is a job role, that have a lot of responsibilities. A database administrator (DBA) is a specialized computer systems administrator who maintains a successful database environment by directing or performing all related activities to keep the data secure.

Duties

• Enrolling users and maintaining system
• Installing and upgrading database server
• Modifying the database structure as necessary
• Controlling and monitoring user access to the database
• Must guarantee that data is stored securely and optimally
• Backing up and restoring databases
• Monitor, optimize and allocate physical data storage for database systems

Required Skills

• Knowledge in database theories, database queries, database design
• Knowledge about the Relational Database Management Systems(RDBMS), E.g. Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL
• Knowledge in Structured Query Language(SQL)
• General understanding about operating systems, storage technologies and ,networking
• And also, routine maintenance, recovery, and handling fail over of a database

Qualification

A database administrator must have a minimum of a 4 year degree in a related field and relevant experience.

• Education: A bachelor’s degree in IT or computer science
• Certifications: Advanced education and certifications are required to work as a database administrator. Obtaining a certification specializing in various database management systems is not required, but very helpful.
• Experience: Many employers require three to five years of experience.

Salary

Average salary of a database administrator is $79,000/yr. But as a salary range, we can say $59,000 - $107,000/yr.

Database Designer

The database designer is responsible for defining the detailed database design, including tables, indexes, views, constraints, triggers, stored procedures, and other database-specific constructs needed to store, retrieve, and delete persistent objects.

Duties

• Design database structure
• Assess feasibility and costs of the database
• Provide data for the database
• Test databases
• Maintain and adapt existing databases according to new user requirements
• Make reports from database data

Required Skills

Knowledge in,

• Business process modelling
• System theory
• Information structure
• Query languages
• Database management systems and system development life cycle
• Web programming and database development tools

Skills in,

• Managing databases
• Using markup languages
• Data modeling, database design
• Object-Oriented analysis and design techniques
• Operating relational database management systems

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer science or Software Engineering.
• Certifications: Oracle and Microsoft certification
• Experience: minimum 2 years of experience

Salary

Average salary of a database designer is $58,000/yr. But as a salary range, we can say $99,000 — $84,000/yr.

Data Engineer

Data engineers are mainly tasked with transforming data into a format that can be easily analyzed. They do this by developing, maintaining, and testing infrastructures for data generation. Data engineers work closely with data scientists and are largely in charge of creating solutions for them and that enable them to do their jobs.

Duties

There are three main roles in this career path. They are Generalist, Pipeline centric and Database centric. Each role has different duties. But in general,

• Develop, construct, test and maintain architectures
• Align architecture with business requirements
• Data acquisition
• Develop data set processes
• Improve data reliability, efficiency and quality
• Deploy sophisticated analytics programs, machine learning and statistical methods
• Prepare data for predictive and prescriptive modeling
• Find patterns in data
• Deliver updates to stakeholders based on analytics

Required Skills

• Strong analytical skills
• Knowledge in software architecture background
• Coding skills
• UNIX scripting and knowledge in SQL
• Skills in Machine Learning(ML)

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s or master degree in related fields. Like, Computer science or Software Engineering.
• Experience: minimum 4 years or more experience

Salary

Salary can vary from $72,000 to $158,000/yr. As an average salary, we can say up to $103,000/yr.

Database Programmer

Database programmers are also known as database developers. A database programmer is responsible for maintaining a database, which includes preserving data integrity. They may actually design, create, and implement a database from scratch.

Duties

• Organizes and prepares data for inclusion in the database
• Manipulates database using software packages as well as original source-language programs
• Prepares data for analysis
• Create and implement customized databases to be used by the application
• Updating the database on a regular basis to guarantee data integrity and for performing checks for quality assurance
• Recover data after a disaster, backups, upgrades, and job scheduling
• And also supporting for clients, end users, and other team members

Required Skills

• Critical and analytical thinking
• Well developed reading skills
• Having documentation and organizational skills
• Ability to order or pattern items according to a set of rules
• Having competent teamwork abilities
• Being able to plan technical solutions
• Computer competency

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field
• Experience: At least 2 years of working experience

Salary

Database programmers earn between $38,000 and $126,000/yr. Average $84,551 a year.

Database Developer

Database developers are the people, who design stable and reliable databases, according to their company’s needs. They will be responsible for developing, testing, improving and maintaining new and existing databases to help users retrieve data effectively.

Duties

• Design stable, reliable and effective databases
• Optimize and maintain legacy systems
• Gather user requirements and identify new features
• Solve database usage issues and malfunctions
• Write scripts to build new database objects.
• Develop stored procedures, functions, packages, triggers and views(using T-SQL)
• Assist with schema design, code review and SQL query tuning.

Required Skills

• Ability to create SQL reports
• Solid understanding of Oracle Database
• Familiarity working with .Net Framework, JavaScript, HTML and Oracle
• Ability to work with a team in an Agile environment
• Ability to understand front-end users requirements and a problem-solving attitude
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Highly organized and self-motivated ability to prioritize projects

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering or Computer Science
• Experience: 3+ years of working experience as a database developer
• Other: 5 -7 years of SQL expertise — you can write a query to do almost anything, 2 or more years of handling a database environment of more than 300GB

Salary

Database developers usually earn average of $73,506 a year. And it can be vary from $57,000 to $96,000/yr.