Brent Ozar discusses the future of DBAs

[MUSIC PLAYING] People becoming a DBA now, some of them are because they're standing closest to the database server, but some of them are actually building databases. This is the intriguing thing about open source. When you work as a developer and you have to write a lot of queries, get data in and out of a database, it's very tempting to say, this database sucks. I could do better myself. And sometimes, they're right. Sometimes, they have unique, specialized needs that no one else has. When I think of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, these are companies that truly needed to design their own database. They had specialized needs, and concurrency problems that most of us could only dream of. Seeing Justin Bieber's tweets go out to, you know, bajillions of people. But even smaller companies, people are going, I have unique needs. I should write my own database. And they do. And then maybe it works and maybe it doesn't, but they become database administrators, or database reliability engineers. And they have a new-found appreciation for just how hard it is to manage concurrency, manage security of databases, manage encryption, all those kinds of things, because they wrote the code from the ground up. That's something we simply did not see five years ago, 10 years ago, because no one was writing their own databases from scratch. As soon as that comes out of my mouth, I'm like, well, some people were. Some people were writing MySQL or Postgres, but it was a really small number of people. Today, that number seems to be growing a little larger. [MUSIC PLAYING]