8 ms·

The Database Administrator is dead

35 points by xivSolutions 13y ago

makomk 13y ago
I think someone's spent too long in tech-startup-land and has forgotten that there's a whole bunch of businesses outside of that, some of which don't have access to reliable internet connectivity and need to keep going even if the Internet's down.
static_typed 13y ago
The DBA is not dead! They just look and smell that way! But in all seriousness, if your app uses a database, you are incompetent not to employ an expert to help with the database, whether advising on the query plan of those non-performant queries, or what is the best setup for the current stage of the business and app, they are very useful.
- mattmanser 13y ago
  Most people don't need dedicated DBAs and worse the DBA often never has sufficient domain knowledge of the problem to make an intelligent suggestion anyway. DBs performance is complicated, yes, but the vast majority of it is extremely simple. It's just none of this simple stuff has to be learnt until it's too late and the cost of fixing it has dramatically increased. There's a certain level where you need a DBA and that bar has been getting higher for years. What we really need is to demystify DB performance, which for the most part is fairly simple. What you need to do is teach your developers how to read those query plans. Show them how to find the expensive queries. To give them tools to easily see what queries their ORM is spitting out. To show them how to use a SQL profiler. Tell your developers how query plan caching actually works. How a clustered index works and what you should and shouldn't put it on. Explain how indexes work. Explain how DB pages actually work and then it's obvious why certain indexes are a bad idea. Explain how relational keys are very important for the DB engine and leaving them off is not an 'oops', it's a serious mistake with long term consequences. And that's at most a few days work. So why do you need that DBA? Aside from that you need someone who knows how to maintain a DB, but again that's not particularly complicated and once it's done you can forget about it apart from the occasional sanity check that it's all working properly.
  - CrossWired 13y ago
    So basically train them to be DBAs?
    - jerf 13y ago
      If you are willing to agree that's what constitutes a DBA, then I don't see much value to the idea of hiring a "dedicated" DBA. (I don't personally accept the first clause, but I also agree that hiring a dedicated specialist is now something only a rarified few need to do, really.)
    - tbrownaw 13y ago
      No, train them to use the database properly. A DBA is the person who keeps the databse running, much like a sysadmin is the person who keeps the server running.
      - baudehlo 13y ago
        That's a naive view of both DBAs and sysadmins these days. They both do much more than just keep things running. Sysadmin has mostly turned into opsdev. Same with DBA.
        tbrownaw 13y ago
        Sysadmin has mostly turned into opsdev. Not in places large enough to value loose coupling (e.g., if keeping your servers running comes out of a different budget than improving your applications).
        baudehlo 13y ago
        Opsdev != dev
  - mgkimsal 13y ago
    "DBA often never has sufficient domain knowledge" "often never"? I've met some DBAs who were quite versed in the business domain. And some that weren't. This is no different to the majority of the developers I run in to, so I'm not sure why you're drawing a line there, except that the article was about database stuff.
- lmm 13y ago
  > if your app uses a database, you are incompetent not to employ an expert to help with the database, whether advising on the query plan of those non-performant queries, or what is the best setup for the current stage of the business and app, they are very useful Given modern databases and modern hardware, I think the vast majority of applications never reach the point where query performance is an issue. For many small software companies hiring an expert in databases makes no more sense than hiring an expert in operating systems or networking - unless your needs are very specialized, these things work well enough out of the box.
izietto 13y ago
The DBA is essential for big companies, not only Facebook or Apple. The author of the post works for a database-as-a-service provider, it's just marketing.
- spydum 13y ago
  Exactly.. Why bother optimizing your database, just spin up more servers (which we will happily continue to squeeze your opex budget dry)! It seems cloud/SaaS is the new answer to throwing hardware at the problem. Something about the inefficiency grinds at me. I do get at certain scales, it makes sense.. But it's not always obvious where that line is.
Xdes 13y ago
DBAs have specialized knowledge related to the maintenance and optimization of a particular SQL engine. Developers see the database as a black box where data gets stored, but there is a lot going on under-the-hood to keep the data reliable, consistent, secure, redundant, and available. The last thing you want is a full transaction log during peak hours.
dsr_ 13y ago
If you are working on confidential data, it is very likely that your security policy does not allow you to store it "in the cloud", or to hand it off to a third party without the kinds of contractual obligations that will perplex and confuse anyone trying to sell a best-effort service. Thus your databases will be in-house, thus you will hire one or more DBAs and depend upon their expertise.
- bluedino 13y ago
  >> If you are working on confidential data, it is very likely that your security policy does not allow you to store it "in the cloud" The regulations will change with the times, hopefully. We stored little more than names/emails and non-identifiable/non-sensitive data at my last job. The 'security auditor' for one client wouldn't let them sign with us because our servers were hosted at Rackspace, so the servers were not under our control and a Rackspace employee could access our data, since they managed our servers.
  - dsr_ 13y ago
    It's not a matter of regulation. It's a matter of liability. As long as the company running the database-as-a-service won't accept full liability against breach of privacy for the information stored there by clients, clients can't store confidential information there. And who wants to do that?
benjaminwootton 13y ago
The DBA may be dead, but he has a lot more life in him than "MongoDB database-as-a-service" is ever likely to have....
joosters 13y ago
TL;DR: Cloud-based DB co-founder says that most of his customers don't employ a DB admin. Um, it would only be surprising if they did, that would surely indicate that his company wasn't doing a good job.
- kennygorman 13y ago
  True. But most of these folks didn't have DBA's or even OPS engineers before they became customers. Mostly they are teams of developers, they have developed the application and have (I think correctly) worried about the customer experience, code base, IP, performance, etc. They do want the database driver API (in this case MongoDB) to just work beyond the interface. Backups, scaling, filesystems, etc they want to be part of the service, and just handled. This is true for new business and it's true for businesses that are developing new apps or new projects or even projects that can't scale out on other infrastructure. Full disclosure: I wrote the article in question ;-).
falcolas 13y ago
I guess I had better tell my colleagues that our jobs are all dead! Wait, it's an absolute statement for a headline, so it's actually "absolute crap". > These days, the technology decision maker is the dude with Sublime Text open and a cloud control panel up in Chrome. And when he is successful and gets clients, and a few thousand rows in his database, he realizes that he needs someone to keep that database alive. He needs someone to figure out how to make the cartesian product queries he's written into efficient queries. At first, he hires a consultant for a few one-off gigs. However, then he's paying someone $200[1] an hour, typically with 8-16 hour engagements. After getting sick of that cost, and still lacking any kind of long term caring about his product, he comes to our team, and hires us to be his DBA, albeit remotely. Business as a DBA is booming. Nobody thinks they need a DBA, but the reality is that you really can't afford to not have a DBA. We have customers coming on board with no backups, no high availability plans, no disaster recovery plans, queries that are performing cartesian products (and thus taking minutes against very small datasets), and no monitoring. (And yes, a good portion of users come to us while using the "solution" proposed by the OP (like AWS RDS), for many the same problems.) We set them up with comprehensive backups, automated failover solutions, and 24x7 monitoring. Suddenly, their DB is no longer the primary source of downtime. They're no longer loosing customer engagement because their frontend takes seconds to render. They're no longer in the position of loosing their entire company because some junior developer accidentally dropped their users table in production. In short, DBAs are a required part of your business, if you're using a database. You just haven't been burned bad enough by a poor database setup to realize it. [1] Actual hourly rates for a planned engagement. Emergency rates are closer to $450 an hour. Why so much? You can't get a DBA from a college, from a technical school, or from any other form of formal education. Most DBAs these days are grown internally from developers or system administrators who decide to (or are forced to) specialize while on the job. There are single-digit thousands of us world wide, and we're in high demand.
- antoko 13y ago
  Apparently you didn't make it to the conclusion. So perhaps the role of the DBA isn’t necessarily dead, it’s just moved to its new home at the datastore-as-a-service provider. The successful DBA will understand that this new world means handling petabytes of data and billions of operations on thousands of logical databases. They will cope with less mature database technologies in increasingly difficult workload environments. They will automate or die. Long live the DBA. The whole post was making the exact same point as you in the end, the author actually runs a datastore-as-a-service business.
bryan11 13y ago
Who organizes how the data is stored? In some companies, the database is largely ignored until performance and scaling is an issue. At that point a DBA is brought in and the next months or even years are spent fixing the design so the entire product can perform properly and grow.
carlmcqueen 13y ago
The world is definitely changing for the DBA to which he made a very good points. I feel he graced over a big facet in a single line of the article which had to do with Apple/Facebook and large companies. The banking world doesn't give their data to others and organization of ATM data, market data, customer account data, etc is only getting more complex and requiring excellent organization and management for terra data analysis to protect cusomters for fraud and worse.
sourc3 13y ago
Persistence ignorance introduced by mainstream ORMs about 5-7 years ago have turned the new generation of programmers blind to the fact database IS part of your application. Records you save don't get sucked into a magic black box that just responds to your queries as your app needs grow. DBAs are not going to go anywhere. Sure, you can scale the DB in the cloud quite a bit in and perform well but it's not free :) In the cloud, you would be literally paying for your bad design decisions in terms of hard dollars rather than performance issues. Most start-ups or in house apps are fine while the salary(dba) => cost of cloud. However, that magic condition starts returning false pretty quickly if you are doing any non-trivial data management.
bluedino 13y ago
The cloud is killing all the low-level admins. Mail administrators? Backup operators? Moving to BYOD will continue to reduce the numbers of administrators as well. Eventually you'll have two groups of IT staff, a very small group of high-level engineers who build and implement everything, and then a very large group of low-skill helpdesk type people who reset your accounts and fill in your login information on your device. Amazon's Mayday support service shows this already. Soon, a form of this will be on every product you can think of. Office, Windows, every tablet and computer in your office.
- secstate 13y ago
  I couldn't agree more. The most apt analogy to explain this to non-tech folks I can come up with is how the automobile went from a hobby toy for the mechanically inclined to a tool people use everyday. There will always be a place in the world for engineers who understand how to get the most of out an internal combustion engine and ways to improve it, just like for database engineers. But we don't all need our car in the shop twice a month having parts tuned. Nor do the vast majority of databases hitting performance limits that would require full-time DBAs. Consulting is a great business decision when you reach hundreds of GB in data. In-house when your tossing around Tera or Peta-btyes. By the way, I can whole-heartedly recommend http://www.pgexperts.com http://www.pgexperts.com if your having Postgres issues. After speaking with a few of their core engineers at DjangoCon 2013 I would consult with them anytime I had PG performance issues.
cognivore 13y ago
So, a thought experiment. Pick any data storage system you like - MongoDb, Redis, Riak, whatever. Now, you get to place a bet. In the future (let's say 25 years) what will still exist: your choice of NoSQL, or the standard database with schema, SQL, access, and so on? If you choose wrong, you die. Now you get to see the future and see if you die. Which are you betting on?
- jrarredondo 13y ago
  Sometimes you just bet on red AND on black to stay safe while keeping the wheel rolling and the drinks coming.
dschiptsov 13y ago
If they define DBA as a guy who sit in a room 9-to-5 for a $100k+ salary, then, yes, there is a recession, you know. But usually (or rather unusually) DBA is an engineer, who could do much more than looking at EXPLAIN output and tune some variables once in a week. I have been Informix DBA for years and I could tell that we were the strongest guys in a team, because in order to do our job we had to understand (abstract out of running system) the data-flows, access pattern (and especially locking issues), actual server's topology (disk controllers, channels, hard-drivers) data partitioning (where this or that table-space lives, what's else on this volume, this channel, this controller) what are the access patterns for each table, how indexes are utilized, etc. We also have patched, compiled and installed all the required software (have you ever tried to compile Informix support into PHP4? you definitely should.)) and to teach coders how to use it, and then deal with access patterns of silly scripts, etc. The claims that some crap like MongoDB (of all things!) service could replace skilled, productive, (but, yes, quite expensive) professionals is, of course, utter nonsense (what else we could expect from MongoDB?). DBAs and Sysadmins (real ones, not these clowns who use nothing but chef or puppet and doesn't know how ./configure && make works) are becoming extinct purely from economical reasons, and all these cloud services, ironically, require even more knowledge to deal with, because all that virtualization crap messes everything up even more (google for redis on EC2 for a change). Sadly, idiots are taking over the world slowly but steadily,)
- secstate 13y ago
  __DBAs and Sysadmins (real ones, not these clowns who use nothing but chief or puppet and doesn't know how ./configure && make works) are becoming extinct purely from economical reasons__ As long as we're insulting people ... it's going to be 2014 in three weeks. Who compiles anything for PHP4? Boasting about an ability to handle other people's messy scripts sounds like an anti-pattern to me, and your recommendation to your org should be to develop a plan to refactor anything dependent on a library that has been deprecated for 6 years and actively out of development for 5. I also feel like the vast majority of folks claiming merit badges as DBAs in 2013 are the product of failed technology roadmaps and technical debt with no plans to pay it off. I'm sure there are still places where true, full-time DBAs are worth their paycheck, but in my experience these are far and few between with the current status of OSS database options and hardware performance.
morgo 13y ago
I am a database administrator. I somewhat agree with the conclusion which essentially says having your on premise DBA is on the decline. Hiring DBAs has always been tricky for employers anyway. It's a position of responsibility (to protect the business' data) that is hard to know you've hired the right person for, difficult to replace, and difficult to allow to take any vacation/leave since there will seldom be more than one. What I don't agree with in the conclusion is that by moving off premise it's all moving to datastore-as-a-service. Large amounts will also move to remote DBA as a service (consulting firms).
islon 13y ago
> These days, the technology decision maker is the dude with Sublime Text open and a cloud control panel up in Chrome. My sublime text is open and I have a cloud control panel open on chrome, am I the technology decision maker? Nobody told me that here on the company. Wait... maybe nobody told me because... I'm the decision maker D=

35 points by xivSolutions 13y ago

I think someone's spent too long in tech-startup-land and has forgotten that there's a whole bunch of businesses outside of that, some of which don't have access to reliable internet connectivity and need to keep going even if the Internet's down.

static_typed 13y ago

The DBA is not dead! They just look and smell that way! But in all seriousness, if your app uses a database, you are incompetent not to employ an expert to help with the database, whether advising on the query plan of those non-performant queries, or what is the best setup for the current stage of the business and app, they are very useful.

mattmanser 13y ago
Most people don't need dedicated DBAs and worse the DBA often never has sufficient domain knowledge of the problem to make an intelligent suggestion anyway. DBs performance is complicated, yes, but the vast majority of it is extremely simple. It's just none of this simple stuff has to be learnt until it's too late and the cost of fixing it has dramatically increased. There's a certain level where you need a DBA and that bar has been getting higher for years. What we really need is to demystify DB performance, which for the most part is fairly simple. What you need to do is teach your developers how to read those query plans. Show them how to find the expensive queries. To give them tools to easily see what queries their ORM is spitting out. To show them how to use a SQL profiler. Tell your developers how query plan caching actually works. How a clustered index works and what you should and shouldn't put it on. Explain how indexes work. Explain how DB pages actually work and then it's obvious why certain indexes are a bad idea. Explain how relational keys are very important for the DB engine and leaving them off is not an 'oops', it's a serious mistake with long term consequences. And that's at most a few days work. So why do you need that DBA? Aside from that you need someone who knows how to maintain a DB, but again that's not particularly complicated and once it's done you can forget about it apart from the occasional sanity check that it's all working properly.
- CrossWired 13y ago
  So basically train them to be DBAs?
  - jerf 13y ago
    If you are willing to agree that's what constitutes a DBA, then I don't see much value to the idea of hiring a "dedicated" DBA. (I don't personally accept the first clause, but I also agree that hiring a dedicated specialist is now something only a rarified few need to do, really.)
  - tbrownaw 13y ago
    No, train them to use the database properly. A DBA is the person who keeps the databse running, much like a sysadmin is the person who keeps the server running.
    - baudehlo 13y ago
      That's a naive view of both DBAs and sysadmins these days. They both do much more than just keep things running. Sysadmin has mostly turned into opsdev. Same with DBA.
      - tbrownaw 13y ago
        Sysadmin has mostly turned into opsdev. Not in places large enough to value loose coupling (e.g., if keeping your servers running comes out of a different budget than improving your applications).
        baudehlo 13y ago
        Opsdev != dev
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  "DBA often never has sufficient domain knowledge" "often never"? I've met some DBAs who were quite versed in the business domain. And some that weren't. This is no different to the majority of the developers I run in to, so I'm not sure why you're drawing a line there, except that the article was about database stuff.
lmm 13y ago
> if your app uses a database, you are incompetent not to employ an expert to help with the database, whether advising on the query plan of those non-performant queries, or what is the best setup for the current stage of the business and app, they are very useful Given modern databases and modern hardware, I think the vast majority of applications never reach the point where query performance is an issue. For many small software companies hiring an expert in databases makes no more sense than hiring an expert in operating systems or networking - unless your needs are very specialized, these things work well enough out of the box.

izietto 13y ago

The DBA is essential for big companies, not only Facebook or Apple. The author of the post works for a database-as-a-service provider, it's just marketing.

spydum 13y ago
Exactly.. Why bother optimizing your database, just spin up more servers (which we will happily continue to squeeze your opex budget dry)! It seems cloud/SaaS is the new answer to throwing hardware at the problem. Something about the inefficiency grinds at me. I do get at certain scales, it makes sense.. But it's not always obvious where that line is.

Xdes 13y ago

DBAs have specialized knowledge related to the maintenance and optimization of a particular SQL engine. Developers see the database as a black box where data gets stored, but there is a lot going on under-the-hood to keep the data reliable, consistent, secure, redundant, and available. The last thing you want is a full transaction log during peak hours.

dsr_ 13y ago

If you are working on confidential data, it is very likely that your security policy does not allow you to store it "in the cloud", or to hand it off to a third party without the kinds of contractual obligations that will perplex and confuse anyone trying to sell a best-effort service. Thus your databases will be in-house, thus you will hire one or more DBAs and depend upon their expertise.

bluedino 13y ago
>> If you are working on confidential data, it is very likely that your security policy does not allow you to store it "in the cloud" The regulations will change with the times, hopefully. We stored little more than names/emails and non-identifiable/non-sensitive data at my last job. The 'security auditor' for one client wouldn't let them sign with us because our servers were hosted at Rackspace, so the servers were not under our control and a Rackspace employee could access our data, since they managed our servers.
- dsr_ 13y ago
  It's not a matter of regulation. It's a matter of liability. As long as the company running the database-as-a-service won't accept full liability against breach of privacy for the information stored there by clients, clients can't store confidential information there. And who wants to do that?

benjaminwootton 13y ago

The DBA may be dead, but he has a lot more life in him than "MongoDB database-as-a-service" is ever likely to have....

joosters 13y ago

TL;DR: Cloud-based DB co-founder says that most of his customers don't employ a DB admin. Um, it would only be surprising if they did, that would surely indicate that his company wasn't doing a good job.

kennygorman 13y ago
True. But most of these folks didn't have DBA's or even OPS engineers before they became customers. Mostly they are teams of developers, they have developed the application and have (I think correctly) worried about the customer experience, code base, IP, performance, etc. They do want the database driver API (in this case MongoDB) to just work beyond the interface. Backups, scaling, filesystems, etc they want to be part of the service, and just handled. This is true for new business and it's true for businesses that are developing new apps or new projects or even projects that can't scale out on other infrastructure. Full disclosure: I wrote the article in question ;-).

falcolas 13y ago

I guess I had better tell my colleagues that our jobs are all dead! Wait, it's an absolute statement for a headline, so it's actually "absolute crap". > These days, the technology decision maker is the dude with Sublime Text open and a cloud control panel up in Chrome. And when he is successful and gets clients, and a few thousand rows in his database, he realizes that he needs someone to keep that database alive. He needs someone to figure out how to make the cartesian product queries he's written into efficient queries. At first, he hires a consultant for a few one-off gigs. However, then he's paying someone $200[1] an hour, typically with 8-16 hour engagements. After getting sick of that cost, and still lacking any kind of long term caring about his product, he comes to our team, and hires us to be his DBA, albeit remotely. Business as a DBA is booming. Nobody thinks they need a DBA, but the reality is that you really can't afford to not have a DBA. We have customers coming on board with no backups, no high availability plans, no disaster recovery plans, queries that are performing cartesian products (and thus taking minutes against very small datasets), and no monitoring. (And yes, a good portion of users come to us while using the "solution" proposed by the OP (like AWS RDS), for many the same problems.) We set them up with comprehensive backups, automated failover solutions, and 24x7 monitoring. Suddenly, their DB is no longer the primary source of downtime. They're no longer loosing customer engagement because their frontend takes seconds to render. They're no longer in the position of loosing their entire company because some junior developer accidentally dropped their users table in production. In short, DBAs are a required part of your business, if you're using a database. You just haven't been burned bad enough by a poor database setup to realize it. [1] Actual hourly rates for a planned engagement. Emergency rates are closer to $450 an hour. Why so much? You can't get a DBA from a college, from a technical school, or from any other form of formal education. Most DBAs these days are grown internally from developers or system administrators who decide to (or are forced to) specialize while on the job. There are single-digit thousands of us world wide, and we're in high demand.

antoko 13y ago
Apparently you didn't make it to the conclusion. So perhaps the role of the DBA isn’t necessarily dead, it’s just moved to its new home at the datastore-as-a-service provider. The successful DBA will understand that this new world means handling petabytes of data and billions of operations on thousands of logical databases. They will cope with less mature database technologies in increasingly difficult workload environments. They will automate or die. Long live the DBA. The whole post was making the exact same point as you in the end, the author actually runs a datastore-as-a-service business.

bryan11 13y ago

Who organizes how the data is stored? In some companies, the database is largely ignored until performance and scaling is an issue. At that point a DBA is brought in and the next months or even years are spent fixing the design so the entire product can perform properly and grow.

carlmcqueen 13y ago

The world is definitely changing for the DBA to which he made a very good points. I feel he graced over a big facet in a single line of the article which had to do with Apple/Facebook and large companies. The banking world doesn't give their data to others and organization of ATM data, market data, customer account data, etc is only getting more complex and requiring excellent organization and management for terra data analysis to protect cusomters for fraud and worse.

sourc3 13y ago

Persistence ignorance introduced by mainstream ORMs about 5-7 years ago have turned the new generation of programmers blind to the fact database IS part of your application. Records you save don't get sucked into a magic black box that just responds to your queries as your app needs grow. DBAs are not going to go anywhere. Sure, you can scale the DB in the cloud quite a bit in and perform well but it's not free :) In the cloud, you would be literally paying for your bad design decisions in terms of hard dollars rather than performance issues. Most start-ups or in house apps are fine while the salary(dba) => cost of cloud. However, that magic condition starts returning false pretty quickly if you are doing any non-trivial data management.

bluedino 13y ago

The cloud is killing all the low-level admins. Mail administrators? Backup operators? Moving to BYOD will continue to reduce the numbers of administrators as well. Eventually you'll have two groups of IT staff, a very small group of high-level engineers who build and implement everything, and then a very large group of low-skill helpdesk type people who reset your accounts and fill in your login information on your device. Amazon's Mayday support service shows this already. Soon, a form of this will be on every product you can think of. Office, Windows, every tablet and computer in your office.

secstate 13y ago
I couldn't agree more. The most apt analogy to explain this to non-tech folks I can come up with is how the automobile went from a hobby toy for the mechanically inclined to a tool people use everyday. There will always be a place in the world for engineers who understand how to get the most of out an internal combustion engine and ways to improve it, just like for database engineers. But we don't all need our car in the shop twice a month having parts tuned. Nor do the vast majority of databases hitting performance limits that would require full-time DBAs. Consulting is a great business decision when you reach hundreds of GB in data. In-house when your tossing around Tera or Peta-btyes. By the way, I can whole-heartedly recommend http://www.pgexperts.com http://www.pgexperts.com if your having Postgres issues. After speaking with a few of their core engineers at DjangoCon 2013 I would consult with them anytime I had PG performance issues.

cognivore 13y ago

So, a thought experiment. Pick any data storage system you like - MongoDb, Redis, Riak, whatever. Now, you get to place a bet. In the future (let's say 25 years) what will still exist: your choice of NoSQL, or the standard database with schema, SQL, access, and so on? If you choose wrong, you die. Now you get to see the future and see if you die. Which are you betting on?

jrarredondo 13y ago
Sometimes you just bet on red AND on black to stay safe while keeping the wheel rolling and the drinks coming.

dschiptsov 13y ago

If they define DBA as a guy who sit in a room 9-to-5 for a $100k+ salary, then, yes, there is a recession, you know. But usually (or rather unusually) DBA is an engineer, who could do much more than looking at EXPLAIN output and tune some variables once in a week. I have been Informix DBA for years and I could tell that we were the strongest guys in a team, because in order to do our job we had to understand (abstract out of running system) the data-flows, access pattern (and especially locking issues), actual server's topology (disk controllers, channels, hard-drivers) data partitioning (where this or that table-space lives, what's else on this volume, this channel, this controller) what are the access patterns for each table, how indexes are utilized, etc. We also have patched, compiled and installed all the required software (have you ever tried to compile Informix support into PHP4? you definitely should.)) and to teach coders how to use it, and then deal with access patterns of silly scripts, etc. The claims that some crap like MongoDB (of all things!) service could replace skilled, productive, (but, yes, quite expensive) professionals is, of course, utter nonsense (what else we could expect from MongoDB?). DBAs and Sysadmins (real ones, not these clowns who use nothing but chef or puppet and doesn't know how ./configure && make works) are becoming extinct purely from economical reasons, and all these cloud services, ironically, require even more knowledge to deal with, because all that virtualization crap messes everything up even more (google for redis on EC2 for a change). Sadly, idiots are taking over the world slowly but steadily,)

secstate 13y ago
__DBAs and Sysadmins (real ones, not these clowns who use nothing but chief or puppet and doesn't know how ./configure && make works) are becoming extinct purely from economical reasons__ As long as we're insulting people ... it's going to be 2014 in three weeks. Who compiles anything for PHP4? Boasting about an ability to handle other people's messy scripts sounds like an anti-pattern to me, and your recommendation to your org should be to develop a plan to refactor anything dependent on a library that has been deprecated for 6 years and actively out of development for 5. I also feel like the vast majority of folks claiming merit badges as DBAs in 2013 are the product of failed technology roadmaps and technical debt with no plans to pay it off. I'm sure there are still places where true, full-time DBAs are worth their paycheck, but in my experience these are far and few between with the current status of OSS database options and hardware performance.

morgo 13y ago

I am a database administrator. I somewhat agree with the conclusion which essentially says having your on premise DBA is on the decline. Hiring DBAs has always been tricky for employers anyway. It's a position of responsibility (to protect the business' data) that is hard to know you've hired the right person for, difficult to replace, and difficult to allow to take any vacation/leave since there will seldom be more than one. What I don't agree with in the conclusion is that by moving off premise it's all moving to datastore-as-a-service. Large amounts will also move to remote DBA as a service (consulting firms).

islon 13y ago

> These days, the technology decision maker is the dude with Sublime Text open and a cloud control panel up in Chrome. My sublime text is open and I have a cloud control panel open on chrome, am I the technology decision maker? Nobody told me that here on the company. Wait... maybe nobody told me because... I'm the decision maker D=