Qualifications/Skills
Some employers require a bachelor's degree or higher in computer science, information technology, engineering or related field to perform job duties as a database administrator.
A database administrator would be expected to have a general understanding of routine maintenance, recovery, and handling a failure of a database, general understanding of storage technologies and networking, general understanding of operating system, e.g. Windows or Linux, general understanding of distributed computing architectures, e.g. Client–server model, knowledge of structured query language (SQL), e.g. SQL/PSM or Transact-SQL, knowledge about the RDBMS itself, e.g. Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL, knowledge of database design, knowledge of database theory and most importantly communication skills.
Employing organizations may require that a database administrator have a certification for the particular RDBMS being used.
Duties
Just looking after a database is a little bit vague, database administrators must:
-Install and upgrade the database server and application tools.
-Allocate system storage and plan future storage requirements for the database system.
-Modify the database structure, as necessary, from information given by application developers.
-En-roll users whilst maintaining system security.
-Ensure that the database vendor license agreement is not being violated.
-Control and monitor user access to the database.
-Monitor and optimize the performance of the database.
-Plan for backup and recovery of database information.
-Maintain archived data.
-Back-up and restore databases.
-Contact database vendor for technical support(if needed).
Personal Qualities
The employee must be able to/have:
-Communicate well with technical assistants.
-Remain calm under pressure for database access.
-Have a positive attitude in the workplace.
-Be able to take constructive criticism from other administrators when something is going wrong.