How many DBA's does it take to change a light bulb?

Come on! They have more important things to do.

How many DBA’s does it take to optimize performance of a data warehouse?  The answer should be the same.

A DBA should be focused on making the information owned by the enterprise as accessible and useful to the enterprise as possible.  Unfortunately, when the data warehouse has been built on a relational database, performance tuning issues will consume most of their time.  Precious little time is left for tasks like identifying user needs, coaching designers and developers, developing and managing database access policy and the myriad of other tasks that directly benefit the business.

Imagine a database that never needs reorganization, never needs a new index and can take in new data sources as if they had been planned for years.  Imagine a database that looks like a star schema designed for every possible query; every column of every table can be either a fact or dimension based on the query.

The value based structure provides all of these benefits and more.  In this system, each value is stored once regardless of where or how frequently it may be used.  The core of the database is an index and linking system that links all of those values into their proper place in records. Because of this structure, every column of every table is always indexed.  There is no way to access anything in this database except through the index.  Inserts, updates and deletes never result in overflow areas or empty spaces in the database – no reorganizing ever.  The size of the database is dramatically less than it would be with the same data in an RDBMS based data warehouse, nearly eliminating physical design issues.

When the database system does all of that for the DBAs, they can spend a lot more time with users and developers to maximize the benefit that the organization gets from its information.  The organizations information is an asset and it is the job of the DBA to ensure that the asset is used as effectively as possible. 

Spending time on ensuring that the database is designed to take advantage of every possible processor cycle does very little to help the business.