What is the expected salary range (per annum or per hour) for mid level PS admin with solid DBA skills in Dallas metro?

I couldn’t find exact match in Salary.com. Are there any other sites I should look into? Any help would be appreciated.

I understand for an experienced admin, it should be in the range of $60/hr to $75/hr depending on the experience, duration of project, the responsibilities and the urgency of the requirement.

For an urgent requirement, a client would be willing to pay even upto $110/hr but it would be for fixing an issue.

I am a DBA at Sonoma State Univ (part of the Calif State Univ system). I am interested in what a PSADMIN does in private company.

For a PeopleSoft installation with the state, we have a centralized group that sends out the latest PS fixes and releases and the campus DBA’s apply them to test instances and the functionals test them and when we are ready the central group applies them to PRD. We debug problems in the PRD db, but we cannot kill processes or tune the production db and have limited write access to the production db.
We rely on the dba’s at central to do that.

How does that differ from private industry?

Thanks,

Allen

Hi Alan:

Nice to hear from a DBA of University. I provide on how it is done in private companies, from my experience. Anyone can feel free to comment on my post.

In smaller private companies, it is limited to one or a few PSADMINS. Shops which have just one instance each for DEV, QA, PILOT, UAT and PROD, they will have one Database DBA and One PeopleSoft Admin (some very small places they have both responsibilities are handled by one person or team).

Larger shops have separate teams or persons for DB and PeopleSoft administration.
I used to work for a client who had more than 200 database instances and I was in the Database admin team and there was a separate PeopleSoft Admin team. I had no access to PeopleSoft Servers or don’t have to do anything with the PIA, besides the database level. The PSADMIN team provides the PeopleSoft projects to migrate to Production and they send requests for refreshes etc. The only thing we used in PIA is use “App Designer” and “Data Mover” to migrate projects and run dms scripts.

We had scripts running to detect the long running queries that is choking the Production Databases and the alerts go to both PSADMINs and Database DBAs. The long running queries are killed on the recommendations of PSADMIN by the DBAs, as they do not have direct access to the Production databases. On third incident of the same query choking up the system, the query is removed from PROD and sent back to DEV to fix/tune.

For any major upgrades (like Tools or Apps upgrades, they form a team from both the groups and they do the testing in a separate environment and when the final production move comes, it is done by DB team at database and PS Server changes are done by the PSADMIN Team)

Your environment (University which I presume is CS and HCM?) would be little bit different from only HCM or Finance and the business model/structure and I understand it would be different as you have different campuses and centralized university managed by campus IT team and University IT Team.

Most of the places I worked, for daily production issues, there will be a production support team (mostly contractors) containing PSADMIN and DBAs and they fix issues at production level and if it needs code change or they can not fix, then they open ticket to the PSADMIN team or DBA team depending on the issue.

The PeopleSoft Admin Team or Person if it is one man show, has the following responsibilities (It is from my experience, then again it varies from shop to shop. Most of the places it is the pattern):

* Install /Administer /Manager PeopleSoft environments (Web servers, Application Servers, Batch and File Servers)
* Apply patches / upgrades / Tax updates (for HCM) – If it is larger organization, then there is an Architect or Architect teamwhich does the preliminary analysis of any patch or upgrade is required in their company and download apply test before it is recommended to the other teams to apply in DEV/PILOT or UAT(User acceptance Test) environments.
* Database DBA team install and apply patches at RDMS level. Migrate projects from one environment, performance tuning, database sizing, Database security etc.

Another challenging area most of the DBAs/ Admins face is provide database access to the developers and at the same time do not provide SYSADM password.

Well it sounds like if I was to make the switch to a private company, I would have the necessary training.

We use HCM/CS and Finance here at Sonoma State (8.4 fin and 8.9 HCM/CS combined with tools 8.4x and Oracle 9i). We receive PS fixes and releases and on top of that the central CSU adds their customizations that are CSU-Wide, and then on top of that we have campus customizations, interfaces, add-ons, etc. that we submit to THE dba’s at central to be appplied to PRD.
At the campus level I administer about 20 db’s with two PRD db’s and the rest testing instances. I also tune the db’s, monitor long running SQL via scripts and tune SQL using explain plans.
I am also proficient in App Engine, SQR and Crystal.

I don’t do anything involved in applying patches to Oracle, Tuxedo, or Web Logic. That’s not even handled by central, that is done by our Application Service provider DBA’s at (Unisys) which hosts our servers in Salt Lake City, UT

As you are installing PeopleSoft fixes and patches, I understand it would be easy for you to download the software including the Oracle Linux in your personal computer and practice the PSADMIN’s tasks.