It’s August. Half the office is out. Dave, the person who knows your Db2 environment better than anyone, who set most of it up, who you’ve called at 6pm on a Friday more than once, is somewhere in Corfu with his phone on do not disturb.
And the database is down.
This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s a situation that plays out in IT departments across the country every summer, every Christmas, every bank holiday weekend. Not because anyone planned badly, exactly. It’s just that at some point, one very capable person became the single point of failure for something critically important and nobody really addressed it.
One person deep is a dangerous place to be
Most small and medium-sized organisations have one DBA. Sometimes that’s entirely reasonable; the environment is stable, the workload is manageable, and hiring two specialists in a niche technology is hard to justify on paper.
The problem isn’t the person. It’s the dependency.
When your DBA is available, everything’s fine. But DBAs get ill. They take holidays they’re entitled to, and they should. They get headhunted, they resign, they have family emergencies. And when any of that happens, the question “who’s covering the database?” suddenly becomes very urgent and very difficult to answer.
The honest answer in most organisations is: nobody with the right skills.
An Oracle DBA or a SQL Server administrator might be drafted in. An IT generalist might take a look. They’ll do their best, and that’s genuinely appreciated but Db2 is Db2. The architecture, the tooling, the way things behave under pressure it’s specific. And getting it wrong, even with the best intentions, can make a bad situation considerably worse.
It’s not just holidays
Holiday cover is the most obvious gap, but it’s not the only one.
DBAs are busy. The workload that sits on one person’s plate typically covers day-to-day monitoring, performance management, capacity planning, availability, security, backup and recovery, and that’s before any project work lands. When a software upgrade comes in, or a seasonal peak hits, or something unexpected goes wrong, that workload doesn’t pause. It stacks.
And some things simply don’t get done when a DBA is stretched; health checks that get deferred, performance issues that get tolerated rather than properly investigated, upgrades that stay on the to-do list for another quarter.
None of that is the DBA’s fault. It’s a resourcing problem dressed up as a technical one.
The questions worth asking now, not later
Before the next bank holiday, it’s worth sitting with these for a moment:
If your DBA was unavailable tomorrow, who would you call?
- Do you have a documented contingency plan, or does the answer live in one person’s head?
- What would a database outage actually cost your business — per hour, per day?
- Are there things that haven’t been done because there simply hasn’t been time?
- When did someone last look at your environment who wasn’t already deep inside it?
If any of those questions feel uncomfortable, that’s useful information.
What good cover actually looks like
The answer isn’t necessarily hiring a second DBA, though for some organisations that’s the right call. For many, what’s actually needed is reliable, specialist cover that’s there when it’s needed and not sitting idle when it isn’t.
That means someone who actually knows Db2. Not a generalist, not someone who’ll figure it out, someone who has worked in these environments for years and can step in without a lengthy handover.
It also means having that arrangement sorted before something goes wrong. The worst time to find out your contingency plan has gaps is when you’re already in the middle of an incident.
A word on the summer specifically
August is consistently the month when IT teams are at their thinnest. It’s also perhaps not coincidentally, when things tend to surface. Systems that have been quietly struggling get pushed over the edge. Issues that were being monitored get missed because the person monitoring them is away.
If your DBA is taking annual leave this summer and you don’t have cover arranged, now is a reasonable time to think about it. Not in a panic, just practically.
How Triton can help
Triton’s Expert on Demand service exists for exactly this kind of situation. Whether you need cover for a specific period, someone to step in during an incident, or ongoing support to sit alongside your existing team, we can provide experienced Db2 specialists without recruitment timelines, long contracts, or retainers you don’t fully use.
And if you’re not sure what you need, we’re offering 2 hours free with one of our experts. No obligation. Just an honest conversation about your environment and where the gaps might be.
Because finding that out in August, when Dave’s in Corfu, is considerably less fun than finding it out now.
Talk to an Expert on Demand – claim your free 2 hours.
Get in touch:
Email: info@triton.co.uk
Call: +44(0) 870 2411 550