Data Storage & Operations (KA 4)

Data Storage & Operations (KA 4)

DBA discipline at enterprise scale — sizing, backup, recovery, performance, retention.

Why it matters

The KA most often outsourced and least often understood by data leadership. When it goes wrong, governance, modelling and quality all look bad.

Going deeper

The five operational deliverables DMBOK expects per data store:

1. Capacity plan — current size, growth rate, refresh strategy.
2. Backup & recovery runbook — RPO + RTO, tested (not theoretical).
3. Performance baseline — p50 / p99 latency on top queries, watched.
4. Retention policy — daily delete job, traceable to the retention rule.
5. Access audit — who touched what, retained for the policy window.

Five artefacts; most stores have one or two. The missing three are where outages originate.

Data storage operations are the hospital facilities team.

If the HVAC fails, the operating-theatre miracles don't matter. Backup power, linen turnover, sterile-instrument flow, biohazard disposal — invisible when right, catastrophic when wrong. Nobody promotes the facilities manager when the lights stay on; everyone fires them when the lights go out.

Storage ops is the same. Quality dashboards and governance councils are the surgeons of your data platform; KA 4 is the HVAC. Run it well and nobody notices.