Pavan DBA's Blog

Experience required for the Job: 5 – 7 years
Job Location: Noida
Dear Candidate,
We have an urgent opening in our organisation for SQL DBA Profile.

To give you a brief introduction about our organization, Imfinity is an e-learning products company. We provide innovative technology solutions in the education and training space to some of the best known organisations, worldwide.

We are a fully owned subsidiary of Excelsoft group. The group comprises of more than 800 talented individuals specialising in product development, instructional design, content development and support services. Our learning solutions are in use by more than 500 organizations and millions of users worldwide.

Pegasus is one of the largest Assessment Management platforms (e-Learning) in the world. Pegasus is a customization of Excelsoft”s flagship product, SARAS. Pearson Education (the largest publisher in the world) provides Pegasus to its customers (colleges and schools) in North America as a hosted model (SaaS). Pegasus, today hosts over 300,000 courses for Pearson customers. It boasts of close to 1.5 million registered users. During peak load, the application receives 40 million hits a day, and about 300,000 unique users per month, with concurrent usage going up to 15,000 users per hour.

The platform is in an active state of development, with the total development team size of 350 (including QA, Project Management, Performance, Database, Support) spread across three locations – Mysore, NOIDA and Vancouver. Pegasus currently has 3 parallel release branches currently in production – one for Higher Education customers, one for School (K-12) customers, and the third one for a niche Language Practice Tests market. A typical release effort comprises of close to 5,000 developer days of effort, with addition of over 100 new features of varying size and complexity.

Pegasus has been built using the latest Microsoft .NET stack – ASP.NET 4.0, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2010. The code base is over 3 million lines-of-code. The data foot print on production is close to 14 Tera Bytes.

In all sense, Pegasus is the perfect example of a large successful enterprise application. With new demands coming from the growing HED and Schools markets, Pegasus is expected to grow in numbers over the next 2-3 years – reaching up to 10 times the peak usage that we are currently achieving. An additional 1.5 million users are expected to come on board Pegasus during Fall 2011 semester in North America.

Job Description:

The member will be responsible for the following line items

1. Providing technical support for the database environment including overseeing the development and organization of the databases, assessment and implementation of new technologies, and providing Information Technology with a long-term perspective on the relationship of database technology to the business opportunities facing the company.
2. To work with architecture, application development and operations to help achieve a state-of-the-art environment that meets current and future business objectives.
3. Trains and develops technical support and applications teams.
4. Provides and designs tools to assist in the management of the database and transaction processing environment.
5. Works to provide a working model of our transaction processing environment for capacity assessment and planning.
6. Develops a methodology for the ongoing assessment of database performance and the identification of problem areas.
7. Develops a security scheme for the database environment, as well as assisting in disaster recovery if necessary.
8. Provides leadership during the development and enhancement of applications including working with applications, technical support and operations during the design, development and implementation of applications.
9. Work with the transaction processing area to develop both the physical and the logical database administration functions and assists in the development of our processing database and computing environments.
10. Work with others in IT to build the logical database area and provide technical guidance during all phases of the development process.

The technical side of things that are required:

a. Understands fundamentals of SQL Server Architecture (Version 2005 & Above)
b. Understands the areas which can affect the database performance and possible steps to resolve the same (Execution plan, Buffer Pool, Data Cache, Access in memory Data Pages etc)
c. Should have hands-on in maintaining a database from building it up to support the system for high availability.
d. Understand the implementation aspects of database mirroring, log shipping, snapshot, isolations, resource governor.
e. Good to have knowledge of SSAS / SSIS / SSRS.
f. Good to mindset from architecture point of view.
g. Good communication skills.
h. Should be able to mentor the team and assist in taking up new challenges & tackle it with optimal tools available.
i. Should have the willingness to stay up-to-date with the SQL DBA area.

priyanka.verma@imfinity.com