Summary

This review describes the concepts of data management and tries to sort through the claims made on the web for codes to manage data. The review outlines what kind of education and qualifications a mine data manager needs. It also examines several data management consultants, associations, websites, and software.

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INTRODUCTION

If you can measure it, you can manage it. Data on the mine comes in many forms, and data management takes many forms. In this review, I try to sort through some of the many concepts of data management on the web and the many claims made on the web for codes to manage data.

STAFF

What education do you need to be a data manager on a mine? Maybe you need to be a trained database administrator. I don't think the link actually defines what a database administrator is, but it at least notes that such a person should have a system to manage data that incorporates these desiderata:

• Recoverability - Creating and testing Backups
• Integrity - Verifying or helping to verify data integrity
• Security - Defining and/or implementing access controls to the data
• Availability - Ensuring maximum uptime
• Performance - Ensuring maximum performance given budgetary constraints
• Development and testing support - Helping programmers and engineers to efficiently utilize the database.

Thus it seems that as long as you are reasonably intelligent, maybe with a degree in science or engineering, and you like sitting at a computer, you can apply for the job. The U.S. Department of Labor has the most intelligent examination of the skills set required to manage data in the modern world, and presumably on a mine. They note that in 2004, the median salary for a data analyst was $60,600. Probably it is more now for those on mines, but I cannot establish more.

I checked out the jobs on InfoMine Careers: Upon entering the keywords "database administrator" I found a few jobs. A couple of them were for geological database administrators, and one was for a GIS database administrator.
You can try your own job searches as well.