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The Database Administrator is dead

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Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#11

Post by static_typed »

mattmanser wrote: post #7
static_typed wrote: post #2

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.

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 t…

Database administration - is not a fire and forget task. It dismays me greatly that so many developers do not see beyond the code in their IDE, and think they can just bring a DBA for a few days, and all will be well. It may also surprise some developers just how much return on investment a good DBA can bring - they can and do learn about the business, the data, the processes and can then help get the best from the database as a result of that knowledge. But they can also serve as an SME on the database engine technology, perhaps pointing out where it is not being used in the right or optimal way. The biggest gains in performance generally come when they help a team of developers who were treating the database as a dumb data store and not making any use of the features offered.

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#12

Post by jerf »

CrossWired wrote: post #8
mattmanser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

So basically train them to be DBAs?

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.)

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#15

Post by ghshephard »

mattmanser wrote: post #7
static_typed wrote: post #2

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.

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 t…

"Most people don't need dedicated DBAs"

That's a pretty easy statement to defend. But, I'll respond by saying that most Companies running Oracle 11g with more than a couple terabytes of databases, require a competent DBA, particularly if Disaster Recovery/Transaction Rollback is important.

" the DBA often never has sufficient domain knowledge of the problem "

Of the half dozen or so truly high level DBAs I've worked with (and managed on occasion), I can say they had incredible domain knowledge of Oracle Database Server, and worked extraordinarily hard to have next to zero knowledge of the application running on it. Their focus was to keep the database running, defend it from engineers and users, and recover it when things went really awry.

"DBs performance is complicated, yes, but the vast majority of it is extremely simple."

Any time you see the phrase, "Extremely Simple" when discussing a domain in which the expert practitioners routinely make $250K/year or more without any form of market manipulation, you need to reconsider why, exactly, these technicians are being paid so much to do something, "Extremely Simple."

"What you need to do is teach your developers how to read those query plans. "

Completely agree here, but, there are two perspectives on this topic. There is the "Engineers are ultimately responsible for the efficiency of their query plans, and should be educated/trained to take that responsibility" and then there is, "We can't train our engineers to be query plan experts, just keep them from shooting themselves in the foot, and let Query Optimizer handle the rests - it's up to the DBA to manage stats gathering to keep DBM_STATS healthy"

I think we tend to see the second approach more frequently in the enterprise, where your engineers are likely making less money, and the company is keen to leverages their many 10s of millions of dollars of Oracle Technology.

Finally, when a company is paying 10s of millions of dollars a years in Oracle licenses, they consider it a worthwhile investment to have a few high-level DBAs to fully leverage that investment.

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#16

Post by falcolas »

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.

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#17

Post by tbrownaw »

CrossWired wrote: post #8
mattmanser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

So basically train them to be DBAs?

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.

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#18

Post by bryan11 »

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.

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#19

Post by bluedino »

dsr_ wrote: post #6

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.

>> 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.

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#20

Post by carlmcqueen »

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.

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