Today's post has been inspired ( fueled ? ) by this linkedin post about what devops should worry about. And the analogy to DBA just triggered me given that amount of failures and bullshit i keep witnessing on a daily basis in my professional life. So here's my opinion on the matter ( the DBA that is, since devops is none of my business so far ).
let's quote the DBA section to launch the rant :
"10 years ago, Database Administrator was one of the hottest skillset. Over time Databases became more robust, Infra became cheaper and Developer resources increased massively - dedicated Database administrator role is now limited to big companies."
TL:DR : this is a bad idea
Let's discuss here first of old school DBAs dating back to before the cloud came. For whatever reason the DBAs, especially in the Oracle world, were usually hired in the operations department of their companies with little to no communication with dev teams. Hence they mainly cared for availability, restarting services, having backups, upgfading the versions and so on. In a few words : they cared about the operational side of all things RDBMSs
And then Cloud, Devops and IaaS came with the winds of change. They simplified the operations of any type of service, bringing new tools and ways to automatize the daily tasks of any administrator. They also lower the cost of many ressources ( but not all ), making having the old school DBA look redundant and expensive.
This is on of the great illusions of Cloud, IaaS & contenairization. They look like a promiss of cost reducxtion for many. but reality always gets back at you ( some call it karma ).
About databases, the fact that many forget is that RDBMSs are at the crossroad between business and operations. The software itself is indisputably part of the operations, deeply rooted in the infrastructure. But what is always overlooked or forgotten is that the content pushed into the database belongs to the business and is usually managed by the dev teams.
But guess who slept during database classes because "database is boring" ? yup, you got it.
Also guess who did not ? yup, you got it too !
So a lot of DBAs did improvise, adapt and overcome all that by shifting their focus from operation to helping the business teams not failing their data design, because they actually know how to do it right. We'll talk another time about the importance of data design in the success of a product.
So no, DBA did not die with the cloud, they learned to focus on a different part of their skillset that most often was not requested until now. Which doesn't mean they didnt have it. Also, i understand having a dedicated DBA can be costly for a smallish company, but this is not a good enough reason not to have the services of data professionnals to do things right during a project. Part time jobs exists, freelancers exists, remote DBA s services also exists, data design training exists. And they all provide necessary advices when asked too.
This whole story reminds me of the emergence of word processing softwares. At the time they were viewed as the tooll that will kill the secretaries jobs. Fact is the companies who developped those softwares did study how secretaries used to type in document on typewriters and emulated all electronically. This happened in the 60s for the electronic part, in the 70s for the software part.
We are now in 2020's and there are still a lot of secretaries even tho their position name changed. So what happened ? Were the softwares not good enough ? Reality is : secretaries quicky adapted and proved to master this new tool faster than anyone without their background and training. They did adapt.
Just like the DBAs did.
Just like the Devops will.
