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The application DBA should also develop strong community ties to the supporting vendor and/or Org. E.g., strong community player with Sakai foundations DBAs. Community source projects may have larger need for application DBA. Home grown application system may not so much. Not sure why this would be true. Could go both ways.
Not This may not a full time position for any one system but needed early on and need to know the application to some extent. Need to understand what the application side is trying to achievelong term but probably will during the development stage. However, looking at Banner, they have 3 people who serve this purpose -- the system architects. They have deep database knowledge but are also strong programmers.
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