Ever wonder what your DBAs do when they’re not dealing with your crisis of the day? Friend and coworker Bob Watkins highlights the DBA’s main tasks in this recent article on Tech Republic.

It’s been said that the database administrator (DBA) has three basic tasks. In decreasing order of importance, they are: protect the data, protect the data, and protect the data.

Although data integrity is clearly the #1 job (who cares if the database is available or fast if the data isn’t good), the DBA has many other jobs as well. Here’s a list of the actual tasks that a DBA performs. (Some duties are common to all DBAs, and others are only required in some database environments.)

Check out the full article where Bob goes on to touch on all the major areas of the typical DBA job including backup and recovery, security, upgrades, tuning and troubleshooting. If you’re looking for a job description for a DBA this is a very good one.