If you are correct then your consultancy can stand to make hundreds of millions and save companies billions on their Oracle instances!
More likely, though, is that Oracle users use Oracle-specific flavors of SQL in lots of legacy apps that no one wants to touch, and rely on the support contracts for continued assistance in keeping the database performant for its query load.
I work with a few former-Oracle DBAs in a PostgreSQL-flavored consultancy now and they are aces. All the root-cause analysis and organization skills transfer handily.
I used to work for a company that paid loads of money to an Oracle consultancy group to do things like optimize queries. Sometimes they'd even do a better job than the Oracle query optimizer :-)
That's a pretty easy statement to defend. But, I'll respond by saying that most Companies running Oracle 11g with more than a couple terabytes of databases, require a competent DBA, particularly if Disaster Recovery/Transaction Rollback is important.
" the DBA often never has sufficient domain knowledge of the problem "
Of the half dozen or so truly high level DBAs I've worked with (and managed on occasion), I can say they had incredible domain knowledge of Oracle Database Server, and worked extraordinarily hard to have next to zero knowledge of the application running on it. Their focus was to keep the database running, defend it from engineers and users, and recover it when things went really awry.
"DBs performance is complicated, yes, but the vast majority of it is extremely simple."
Any time you see the phrase, "Extremely Simple" when discussing a domain in which the expert practitioners routinely make $250K/year or more without any form of market manipulation, you need to reconsider why, exactly, these technicians are being paid so much to do something, "Extremely Simple."
"What you need to do is teach your developers how to read those query plans. "
Completely agree here, but, there are two perspectives on this topic. There is the "Engineers are ultimately responsible for the efficiency of their query plans, and should be educated/trained to take that responsibility" and then there is, "We can't train our engineers to be query plan experts, just keep them from shooting themselves in the foot, and let Query Optimizer handle the rests - it's up to the DBA to manage stats gathering to keep DBM_STATS healthy"
I think we tend to see the second approach more frequently in the enterprise, where your engineers are likely making less money, and the company is keen to leverages their many 10s of millions of dollars of Oracle Technology.
Finally, when a company is paying 10s of millions of dollars a years in Oracle licenses, they consider it a worthwhile investment to have a few high-level DBAs to fully leverage that investment.
I think that a key explanation of Oracle success is that the complexity of their database administration has created a generation of full time jobs: DBA. These people are like salesman working for Oracle to defend the future of their job. They are well paid, but this cost nothing to Oracle. At the opposite, Oracle can sell training.
Heck yeah I'd sign up for that! Honestly, this is the kind of work that can sustain an entire consulting firm.
- It's specialized, so you can charge more for it. And I mean come on, we're saving you millions of dollars. I can charge you a LOT and everyone still wins.
- It's repetitive, so you can train people to do it and then start earning margins as they replicate the process across the organization.
- It's even fulfilling. Yeah, I said it. Would you rather go work on another to-do app in [pick an obscure fruit or animal]-framework for your blog? Count me out of _that_ crap. Any Oracle DB you work on in the wild is going to have an impact on thousands of people--a positive one if you do your job well.
Sure, but the division between Oracle Database and MySQL Database is pretty large; that being said I wouldnt be surprised if they had somehow gotten some money out of it.
I'm not sure that's correct. AFAIK, having deep Oracle knowledge is very valuable to the right employer, but not so much for non-Oracle shops.
From my experience ~20 years ago, Oracle and SQL Server were very different beasts.
IIRC, once you get past trivial querying and into storage design, query optimization, etc., they're very different beasts. And Oracle in particular is it's own, huge world at that level. (Again, if I recall correctly.)
You truly underestimate the zealotry and kool-aid drinking capacity of the average Oracle DBA. When your entire career is based on the training and certifications you've received from a single company, every database solution magically becomes Oracle...
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