Did You Know? Most business-critical transactions are processed by a mainframe. It’s the platform that never sleeps and one that we tend to take for granted because it just works.
Imagine going to a bank ATM to withdraw cash for an evening out and being told that your transaction cannot be processed. Or handing your credit card to a restaurant cashier and the transaction does not complete. Luckily, few, if any, of us have ever had to face these embarrassing scenarios – because the mainframe is well managed. But who manages these big iron cornerstones for us?
Behind the scenes, database administrators (DBAs), application developers, and system engineers, among others, work hard to enable a seamless experience at the point of interaction. They are among the many unsung heroes who do their jobs so well that the economy continues to hum without a peep.
Today, DBAs gauge the system’s overall health, prioritize tasks, and act based on key metrics available through a single pane of glass on a visual dashboard. They look at individual subsystems, go through the system log files, reviewing statistics and performance reports, while also addressing any batch issues from the day before.
DBAs perform regular baseline and performance reviews to understand the minimum requirements for a system or application to run. Often, DBAs are also part of a larger team that supports one or more applications and are responsible for both development and production environments. They run tests and verify any database changes as well as other related code changes in development before deploying to production.
Many DBAs need to oversee Db2 for z/OS version and maintenance upgrades as part of their day-to-day tasks. Now add to this the herculean task of acting as security gatekeepers—they must understand auditing requirements and help determine who needs access and the type of access to be granted. This is a massive job they have!
Finally, these modern heroes of the mainframe can be brought out of the shadows and into the light to be recognized for the tremendous work they do in support of their businesses. DBAs do their jobs not for the recognition, but because they are indeed the Swiss army knife of their organization. For their selfless acts–at times fighting multiple fires from different directions–it’s important to thank our DBAs and make sure we are enabling them by leveraging modern tooling, performance dashboards, and more.
There’s no time to waste! You can enable and recognize your mainframe DBAs now.
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Co-Author: Samantha Buhler
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