Neon Enterprise Software Blog

One of the most popular blog topics always seems to be salary-related information. With that in mind, I thought I'd examine the results of the most recent salary survey conducted by Certification Magazine. Let's start our examination at a high level. Over 35,000 IT professionals responded to the Certification Magazine 2007 Salary Survey and their average salary is up over 8.5% from $68,820 in 2006 to $74,730 in 2007. That is a nice trend as it shows salary growth for IT professional outpacing inflation.

While that is, indeed, good news, readers of this blog work with data and database systems. So what did the survey tell us about data-focused jobs? Perhaps the most interesting result from this survey for us data guys (and gals) is the average salary by specification section. Here we find that the average salary for DBAs is $83,160 and the average salary for those focused on database design and implementation is $85,810. As always, we find strange results like this. For those of us who specialize in DBA and data management it is kinda hard to distinguish between these two categories. I mean, don't DBAs design and implement databases? Perhaps it is the survey's way of delineating between DBA and DA (or data management), but this is not at all clear -- at least not to the reader, and probably not to those who responded to the survey.

So what of those salaries? Let's compare them to the salaries in the 2007 IT Salary Survey conducted earlier this year by Janco Associates, Inc. Janco's salary survey is based on over 50,000 data points collected from survey forms sent to businesses throughout the United States and Canada. It will be a bit difficult to compare because, once again, there were quite a few different titles to slog through to get to meaningful results for data professionals. The three most pertinent job titles in the study were Manager - Data Warehouse, Manager - Database, and Database Specialist. We probably can assume that Manager - Database is close enough to DBA Manager and Database Specialist is akin to a DBA. There were additional data points in the Janco survey, too, so here are the results for those three job titles:

This seems to show some kind of consistency between the two surveys with DBAs earning in the mid-80's, at least for large companies.

Back to the Certification Magazine survey. Since this magazine focuses on certification they broke down the salary results based upon certification levels. Here are the results for the ones we'd care about:

• IBM Certified DBA / Application Developer - $87,390
• Microsoft MCDBA - $78,420
• Oracle DBA OCA - $79,730
• Oracle DBA OCP - $84,520
• Oracle Developer OCP - $78,250

What do these results tell us? I think it shows that there might be a premium associated with being DB2 certified and even for the higher Oracle certification. I say "might" because these results could also show that there is a premium associated with managing larger environments. The DB2 numbers would have the mainframe environment as a component, which is larger than the Unix that is closely associated with Oracle, which is larger than the Windows world of Microsoft SQL Server. If you look at the salaries for those certified to manage those environment this pans out. According to this survey Sun certified professionals earn larger salaries (on average) than do Microsoft certified professionals.

What were the fields at the top of the rankings, you may ask? The highest paid specialization (on average) was for "Storage Design and Implementation," which I'm guessing has to do with the ever-expanding amount of data companies are managing. And the highest paid certification (on average) was for a Brocade Certified SAN Manager... number two was for an ISACA Certified Information Security Manager.

If you want to read more details about the Certification Magazine salary survey be sure to click on this link to read all about it on their web site.