In the last few years I saw many changes in DBA daily duties and responsibilities. Well, probably I should have said many additions to daily duties. DBAs always have had some level of skills related to something outside the database: from server and storage hardware configurations, OS configurations, networking and virtualization, to external tools to help doing theirs jobs, like performance benchmark tools, centralized backup solutions, monitoring tools, hundred of thousands custom scripts, etc.

From standard duties like guarantee database restore & recovery and availability, installations and maintenance, performance tuning, moving and reorganizing data around, we now have the power and responsabilities to manage vast and/or complex ecosystems with databases and services, ranging and raging from small to giant to big data, from data flowing to and from cloud services and data lakes, to automation.

So, our job is now a different beast;  what we are accostumed to do is only a part of our day to day and it is where our future is built upon.

Many of us born as developers striving for performance, many others born as sysadmin building yet another resilient Oracle database from scratch. We always were some sort of DevOps, bridging the gap between data and infrastructure and developers. We always keep an eye on our data (our tresure!) so we may not want to destroy and rebuild everything from zero like real DevOps, but we can work our way to continuous delivery (like a boss).

I hope this blog will unchain some of your power. 🙂

Cheers!