Brent Ozar reveals DBAs' top three worries

[MUSIC PLAYING] The three things that keep DBAs awake at night-- the first and foremost one in the year 2018 is my job. People, especially in the DBA field, no one was ever really secure in their job to begin with because a lot of us suffer from imposter syndrome. We feel like we don't really deserve to be here. Because remember, we all came in accidentally. We don't have some kind of certificate that says you know what you're doing. So we keep feeling like at any moment someone is going to find out that I'm kind of a fraud here. And then how will I possibly go get my next job? That's become more significant with the cloud, all these alternative database platforms. There's a paranoia level that some bloggers and presenters feed into like you're going to be replaced. The robots are coming for your job. The system's going to manage itself. Anyone who's used Siri or any kind of voice recognition tool knows that the robots are not anywhere near close to taking our jobs. They cannot successfully order me a pizza yet with the toppings that I want. The second fear that a lot of DBAs have that keep him up at night is the cloud. Vendors like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, it's in their best interest to sell companies into the cloud because then they make money every single month. So DBAs see all these ad campaigns from big database, or from big cloud companies saying, come on in. We'll manage everything for you. Don't worry. And DBAs are going to worry that companies fall for the hype. The nice thing about the cloud is that some of the hype is really true, that they take care of the parts of your job that just utterly suck. And the companies still need a database administrator. It's just that your job duties are different, and then the third is probably the number of people who come in bringing us different database platforms. Here, this is mongo DB. It looks like a database. You should go monitor it. Here it's-- here's Sybase. We had one of these from another company. Here's Cassandra, whatever. And we go oh, man, I thought I sucked at SQL Server. I thought I sucked at Oracle. Now, I suck at 10 more different things. And it's hard for DBAs when often the job breeds a sense of pride and paranoia and security. It must be done perfectly. We've got to be more willing to say, I'm going to do the best I can with the time that I have and the tools that I have. I am going to lose data sooner or later. I'm going to get hacked sooner or later. I can just only do the best job that I can and alert my company the best I can that here's where I see the risks and here's what I want to do to help mitigate some of those risks. [MUSIC PLAYING]