Website database expert needed

Addictedtogolf

Hi Guy's,
I am looking for database expert ideally based in Waterford as I have a new website almost fully designed but I need a database expert to finish that side of the website.

Please private message me if you can do this or know someone?
(Ohh and please don't recommend someone that charges silly money :-)

Digital Society

Addictedtogolf wrote: »

(Ohh and please don't recommend someone that charges silly money :-)

Please dont expect to get an "expert" for peanuts. It works both ways.

It might be a good idea to actually give more details of what you need done.

Addictedtogolf

Digital Society wrote: »

Please dont expect to get an "expert" for peanuts. It works both ways.

It might be a good idea to actually give more details of what you need done.

Not expecting an expert for peanuts but not willing to pay silly money either as this is a start-up project.
Ideally I would love to find someone with the skills I need that is not working at the moment instead of a company that will quote you 50-100euro a hour which in my opinion is "Silly money".

I would prefer to discuss privately or even better let the web site designer explain what is needed.

iseegirls

I wonder is it to do with golf :pac:

Addictedtogolf

iseegirls wrote: »

I wonder is it to do with golf :pac:

Its a bingo lol

cronkfield

Your best bet for the rates you want to pay is to find a student to do it. I find it surprising that your web developer can't do it. You won't find any un-employed database experts in Waterford, prob none within 100 miles. I'd have the skills you need, but don't see why I would want to give up my spare time, for a small return. I have no idea how big the job is, bit if you say 10 hours and you pay 40 euro a hour, that would only leave you with about 200 euro after tax.

Digital Society

Move this to the developers forum and watch the OP get mauled into reality

Addictedtogolf

cronkfield wrote: »

Your best bet for the rates you want to pay is to find a student to do it. I find it surprising that your web developer can't do it. You won't find any un-employed database experts in Waterford, prob none within 100 miles. I'd have the skills you need, but don't see why I would want to give up my spare time, for a small return. I have no idea how big the job is, bit if you say 10 hours and you pay 40 euro a hour, that would only leave you with about 200 euro after tax.

20euro a hour after tax don't seem to bad to me. But then again 40 without tax seems better :-)

jmcc

Addictedtogolf wrote: »

Not expecting an expert for peanuts but not willing to pay silly money either as this is a start-up project.
Ideally I would love to find someone with the skills I need that is not working at the moment instead of a company that will quote you 50-100euro a hour which in my opinion is "Silly money".

Yes. A database expert should be charging at least five times that amount. You can probably get a web developer with small database (<100MB database footprint) experience for the amount you expect to pay. However few if any of them will be website database experts or have anything approaching the skills of a database architect or administrator. Of course you will only find out how limited the expertise of your web developer/database expert really is when your website crashes because it got a few more simultaneous users than expected. I don't know of any website database experts in Waterford but there are lots of web developers who could probably build a small (<100MB) database backed website. You haven't actually given any idea of the specifications of your website.

Building a large database backed website that will be used by large numbers of users and the capability to expand smoothly requires more than student/web developer expertise. This is where you are talking real money and real expertise - expertise that only a few people in Ireland actually possess.

It requires proper planning and a good database architecture is at the heart of that plan. Now you can either pay for the expertise and do it right the first time or you can adopt the cheap approach and pay peanuts, get monkeys and find you have to redevelop your site and your database as it becomes more popular.

Go back and draft a specification of what your site needs and how it has to perform. Then you will be in a position to estimate the kind of expertise you require to get it developed.

Regards...jmcc

rovoagho

Addictedtogolf wrote: »

Not expecting an expert for peanuts but not willing to pay silly money either as this is a start-up project.

It's important to have a special rate for startups. Mine is my twice my usual rate, to cater for the extra time I have to take fixing the mess I've been presented with, explaining everything in ridiculous levels of detail, and of course tolerating the bull I have to listen to.

Same rate applies to public bodies, city and county councils, charities, basically anything involving a committee and their nonsense politics and infighting.

the_syco

Addictedtogolf wrote: »

20euro a hour after tax don't seem to bad to me. But then again 40 without tax seems better :-)

If this is your attitude to paying people, I'm guessing you've made the website so far by yourself, and now want a database expert to do the complete database section for peanuts?

Addictedtogolf

the_syco wrote: »

If this is your attitude to paying people, I'm guessing you've made the website so far by yourself, and now want a database expert to do the complete database section for peanuts?

NOPE and is 20euro a hour Peanuts? WOW
Anyway don't stress as I have gotten loads of replies from people looking for some work.

jmcc

Addictedtogolf wrote: »

NOPE and is 20euro a hour Peanuts? WOW

Well for database expertise. I'm sure that you will get a few students interested but the response from database professionals would be rather abrupt and, perhaps, offensive.

Anyway don't stress as I have gotten loads of replies from people looking for some work.

Hope it works out well and good luck with it.

Regards...jmcc

7upfree

jmcc wrote: »

Well for database expertise. I'm sure that you will get a few students interested but the response from database professionals would be rather abrupt and, perhaps, offensive.

Hope it works out well and good luck with it.

Regards...jmcc

My outlook is that you get what you pay for. That being said, on the odd occasion you may be tripped up.

Digital Society

OP have you any experience at all with Database management? What are you gonna do when something goes wrong for example?

Edit

Also something interesting here. http://www.cpl.ie/Content/uploads/salary-survey/ Page 45 or so it says the average wage per day for a database developer is 400.

MajorMax

Some people have to learn the hard way :rolleyes:

jayboi

What's a website database?

Addictedtogolf

Also something interesting here. http://www.cpl.ie/Content/uploads/salary-survey/ Page 45 or so it says the average wage per day for a database developer is 400.[/QUOTE]

I have been getting my salary very wrong over the last few years.
400 a day...!!!
I know what my next job will be. I currently work approx. 10hrs a day 6-7 days a week, which does not include getting up at 3am to catch flights all over the place and does not include overtime for bank holidays, Holidays, Christmas, etc. But interesting that someone can earn 400 a day in Ireland doing that kind of work in these tough times.
Best of luck to them but I wont be paying anyone 400euro a day except maybe a heart specialist that try's to bring me back from a heart attack if I did pay someone 400euro a day.

rovoagho

I charge €75 an hour or €525 a day, discounted slightly to regular customers, and I've only ever had complaints from a minority that don't understand or appreciate my skills; people that invariably tell me that they can get a student or sweatshop or Indian gentleman to do it for a fraction of that. I tell them they're welcome to get in touch when the my "competitor" gets stuck, or stops answering their phone, or their site is hacked; at which point it invariably ends up costing more to fix.

If you're not happy with your earnings, I'd suggest you learn a skill. Communications might be a good place to start.

curly.bert

This is a very interesting thread and it being Boards, I'll chime in with my two euro cents:

1. There's an IT skills shortage in Ireland (and most of the developed world) at the moment. Hence, there are higher salaries for in-demand skills. http://www.irishexaminer.com/business/severe-ict-skills-shortage-highlighted-by-4500-vacancies-232150.html

2. Despite that, the ICT sector in Ireland is booming. It's not "tough times" in all industries. http://www.eolasmagazine.ie/ict-sector-dominates-irish-exports/

3. However, to go back to the OP's initial query, I'd ask why the web developer can't sort out the database themselves. Most of the off-the-shelf content management systems (e.g. Joomla, Wordpress) will auto create and configure a database for back-end use with a site they're being used to manage. So if you have a relatively simple site (technology wise), the web person should be able to do it themselves. If it's a more complicated site, perhaps managing payments & transactions, then you should definitely get a professional to look at it. Professionals cost money.

4. If it's a simple site and the web developer CAN'T sort out the DB back end, there's a good chance they're not up to the task and the OP might be better off cutting their losses and going to one of the local professional web design/development companies.

BrightLight (http://www.brightlight.ie) and Vitamin Studio (http://www.vitaminstudio.ie) are both excellent and charge reasonable rates.

(FYI I'm not involved in either company, but have worked with both in the past and found the people involved know their stuff and are sound to deal with)

Finally, €20/hour for a professional contract developer in any ICT discipline is incredibly cheap. To quote one of the great philosophers of our time "Cowboys, Ted - Cowboys!!!"

7upfree

rovoagho wrote: »

I charge €75 an hour or €525 a day, discounted slightly to regular customers, and I've only ever had complaints from a minority that don't understand or appreciate my skills; people that invariably tell me that they can get a student or sweatshop or Indian gentleman to do it for a fraction of that. I tell them they're welcome to get in touch when the my "competitor" gets stuck, or stops answering their phone, or their site is hacked; at which point it invariably ends up costing more to fix.

If you're not happy with your earnings, I'd suggest you learn a skill. Communications might be a good place to start.

As I said earlier - you get what you pay for. Cheapest is not always best. Although some would have you believe that.

old gregg

Not surprised at the idea that a web designer mightn't know about databases. There are plenty around that are little more than dreamweaver users who wouldn't know an SQL query if it bit them on the arse.

Addictedtogolf

If you're not happy with your earnings, I'd suggest you learn a skill. Communications might be a good place to start.[/QUOTE]

Love it. Genuine. Class reply.

jmcc

old gregg wrote: »

Not surprised at the idea that a web designer mightn't know about databases. There are plenty around that are little more than dreamweaver users who wouldn't know an SQL query if it bit them on the arse.

Yep. A lot of web designers think that editing a few Joomla or Wordpress templates gives them a knowledge of database backed websites. However what generally happens is that their sites fold under relatively low traffic levels because the SQL queries were not optimised and the database schema had no real indices or the designer chose the wrong column as an index.

This is for the OP and anyone who doesn't know what a database backed website involves:

The content for a database backed website is mainly stored, unsurprisingly, in a database. The content is generated from the results of queries to that database and the pages are a combination of webpage templates and those results.

Perhaps the OP's site requirement is just a small site with a shopping cart. That would be a relatively straightforward design. However when it gets into the the custom database area a lot more things come into play. The OP never gave any indication of whether the site was a low traffic or high traffic site or even how many simultaneous users the site could expect. This lack of precision and definition scares the crap out of database backed website designers because traffic, read/write ratios (the data being taken out of the database and the data being put into it), query complexity, and hardware resources all come into play when designing a custom database backed website. The difference is between a website that struggles to serve 800 pages a day and one that doesn't even break a sweat serving 800K pages a day. However they don't teach that kind of specialisation (it is a combination of database expertise, software expertise, hardware expertise, systems expertise and, rarest of all, experience) on college courses and that's why using a student could be lethal for such a site.

Every web developer has probably run across a tyre-kicking exercise like this. It is short on facts and specifications and wants the world on the cheap. For small websites with a handful of pages and limited traffic, the OP may get away with not paying decent rates and getting some kind of slightly modified bunch of Joomla or Wordpress templates by a student on holidays. However websites have to be maintained when there is content or e-commerce involved. That has to be factored into the project costs. (Just on the monthly web surveys of the Irish webscape, approximately 23% of sites are never updated within a year and there are at least 1174 compromised websites and most of them are vulnerable Joomla/Wordpress installations.)

If the OP's site is just an ordinary small site with a shopping cart then a "database expert" might not even be required. However the fact that the OP has a site but no backend is disturbing. On a database backed site, the queries are part of the website's coding so there's a major section missing. The database has to be integrated with the site as it will be supplying most or all of the content. This might require templates and webpages to be rewitten at the HTML level. Even that could, if it is a relatively simple site be replaced by a customised Joomla or Wordpress site.

Regards...jmcc