The job duties that DBAs are giving up, some of the big ones are backups. There have been more and more backup software coming out from other angles. Virtualization backups, if they go into the cloud, the cloud provider does the backups for them.
And it's not the traditional DBAs are happy about that. Traditional old school DBAs go, well if I don't do it, it's not going to be done right. You know, it has to be done the way that I want to do it, or else when it's time to do a restore, I have no belief that those people will actually be able to restore my data with confidence. But that's being pried away from our hands as database administrators because there are so many apps that do a good enough job of taking backups.
Instead, we're being handed more high value things to the business. How do you go figure out how we can be compliant with all kinds of security regulations? How do we make sure our database doesn't end up on the front page of the newspaper? How do we enable people who now need access to the data that never did before?
We have these BI teams, data science teams, executives with all kinds of reporting options. Power BI, Tableau, and they're asking to hook directly into the database and get the data out that they want. We're being asked to empower them and make their reports go as quickly as possible.
We're also being asked to do things that we never were before around DevOps. How can we automate deployments so that we can do more deployments, get to market faster, bring people the features that they want faster? They're also getting handed, database administrators are also getting handed a lot of tools that they've never seen before. Hey, here's MongoDB, it looks like a database. You should probably manage that. Hey, here's Elasticsearch, this has data in it, you should go manage that.
And they're kind of struggling with, how do I learn all these new different platforms? It was hard enough for me to learn the platform I already had. Now how do I go tackle these additional new ones?
