In the 2 1/2 years he worked for us, we had a total of two issues. First time it was a storage array went down, and our regular DBAs were having difficulty bri

In the 2 1/2 years he worked for us, we had a total of two issues. First time it was a storage array went down, and our regular DBAs were having difficulty bringing the dataguard replica back online - Our Senior DBA resolved it within 5 minutes. Second issue was an application corruption that we got stuck into the weeds with until, once again, Our Senior DBA just stepped in, restored a backup and then rolled us forward just before corruption occurred. And no service credits, he was just an extraordinarily talented DBA - we were happy to have him set our architecture/monitoring/database deployment mechanisms. I'm guessing he worked around 100 hours for that 50K over a year, or about $500/hour, which, if you think about it, for someone at the very, very top of their Oracle (or Cisco, or Java, or Hadoop, etc..) technical game is really quite reasonable - particularly when you are only paying them when they are absolutely needed, and the rest of the time your staff DBAs can handle the day-to-day.