For much of my career as a DBA, I spent a lot of time working on issues that technology and software are eliminating. Issues like space management, performance management, building new systems and configuring complex availability options like Clustering.
Why is this changing? There are many reasons, but the most prominent are: mature Virtualization technologies, the public cloud, cheaper hardware, and significantly better automation tools.
Does this mean the DBA career is dead?
Heck no!
DBAs have a lot of valuable skills. I believe that the DBA that we used to call ‘The Production DBA’ (the DBA who spent most of their time checking logs, installing servers and managing space) will soon cease to exist. The B-List tasks will go away.
Don’t believe me?
I can issue a few PowerShell commands and have a server, a cluster or even an availability set created in moments. By nature of using something like SQL RDS or SQL Azure, I have geo-redundancy built right into the program.
With all that said, DBAs are still desperately needed (good riddance to boring tasks!)to help make sense of the technologies, architect solutions, implement the solutions, support the databases, consolidate data, and facilitate analytics .
How can you future proof your career? What should you learn? How can you get started?
Join Warner Chaves and I on the debut episode of the Datascape Podcast. We discuss what’s in store for the changing DBA career, what you should be learning, how you can get started and adapt your career to the new version of the DBA.
You can find it on iTunes, Google Play, Soundcloud and just about anywhere podcasts are shared.
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