What is the future of a DBA in the world of databases?

In the non-transactional area, often known as the analytical space, we are also seeing the cloud coming strong. It is not just the pure operational tasks being removed, even the query optimization is being automated or removed. Heck, Snowflake doesn’t even have indices.

As I see it the cloud changes the game.

In particular the DBaaS offerings like Amazon RDS. These offerings allows companies to “outsource” most of the work previously done by the DBA.

The cloud also changes another dynamic: Many applications really solely have a requirements for a well-perfoming ACID compliant RDBMS. It is luckily rarely the case that an application has put logic into the database itself (in terms of elaborate Stored Procedures or Triggers, something you should largely refrain from as an application developer in 2022) and therefore needs a specific database engine. Such requirement more often comes from a corporate level. “Oracle / MS SQL Server (usually one of those) are the databases we know how to operate and make HA so you must use that.”. Once this argument is removed the choice is more free. Does it really have to be MS SQL Server ? … or might just as well be e.g. PostgreSQL? The answer is often “yes” now that the operational tasks can be outsourced. This changes the playing field for the in-house DBA. There’s a lot less of an attachment to a particular database engine. Knowing everything about MS SQL Server’s Always On Availability Groups is no longer a skill which you can sell at a premium to your employer. Not only can the employer get the cloud to do that part for him, he’s also less likely to be bound to the commercial database offerings.

In the non-transactional area, often known as the analytical space, we are also seeing the cloud coming strong. It is not just the pure operational tasks being removed, even the query optimization is being automated or removed. Heck, Snowflake doesn’t even have indices.

If I was a DBA I would be quite concerned these days. The DBA needs to re-invent himself.