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The Database Administrator is dead

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Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#31

Post by mdm_ »

falcolas wrote: post #16

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…

Could you provide any tips/advice/reading recommendations to a programmer who is interested in learning more dba stuff? It would be appreciated!

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#32

Post by falcolas »

jbooth wrote: post #21
ghshephard wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Why would someone run Oracle in this day and age? "We have 100k lines of established PL/SQL running our business" is a reason, of course, but you could make a similar argument that COBOL development is alive. PL/SQL pretty much always leads to an unmaintainable mess, and if you need BIG DATA, you can go much bigger without Oracle than you can with it, and cheaper to boot.

Because at a certain size of business, paying developers to make patches against your favorite OSS database doesn't scale. It's cheaper to pay for a, let's be honest, damned fine piece of software.

Oracle, despite being the very definition of evil, has one hell of a software product. It is performant, has built-in features that makes Postgres look like BerkelyDB, HA solutions, and perhaps most importantly, the backing and support of a multi-billion dollar company.

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#33

Post by falcolas »

antoko wrote: post #23
falcolas wrote: post #16

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…

Apparently you didn't make it to the conclusion. So perhaps the role of the DBA isn’t necessarily dead, it’s just moved to its new home at the datastore-as-a-service provider. The successful DBA will understand that this new world means handling petabytes of data and billions of operations on thousands of logical databases. They will cope with less mature database technologies in increasingly difficult workload envir…

I did, except that:

> The successful DBA will understand that this new world means handling petabytes of data and billions of operations on thousands of logical databases.

is untrue. Most of our customers have DBs that are in the GB size. A few have TB size DBs, and none are on that scale.

datastore-as-a-service doesn't replace DBAs - we make good money being remote DBAs for people who are using datastore-as-a-service providers, because they still run into the same problems as everyone else.

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#34

Post by jbooth »

falcolas wrote: post #32
jbooth wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would someone run Oracle in this day and age? "We have 100k lines of established PL/SQL running our business" is a reason, of course, but you could make a similar argument that COBOL development is alive. PL/SQL pretty much always leads to an unmaintainable mess, and if you need BIG DATA, you can go much bigger without Oracle than you can with it, and cheaper to boot.

Because at a certain size of business, paying developers to make patches against your favorite OSS database doesn't scale. It's cheaper to pay for a, let's be honest, damned fine piece of software. Oracle, despite being the very definition of evil, has one hell of a software product. It is performant, has built-in features that makes Postgres look like BerkelyDB, HA solutions, and perhaps most importantly, the backin…

Eh. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Most of those built-in features are anti-features IMO, and none of them make up for having to maintain long-ass PL/SQL functions as opposed to a reasonable programming language. And as far as performance goes, SSDs are cheaper than Oracle licenses, by a lot.

Oracle doesn't have any magic pixie dust that changes your underlying hardware. If you want raw performance, BerkeleyDB will wipe the floor with Oracle, because it's that much simpler. You've just got a much smaller feature-set as a result.

You probably see things differently than me, though. Related question since you're a DBA -- what are the best practices for testing PL/SQL, you have a link or anything? Every place I've seen it done was a nightmare and involved a lot of crossed fingers during releases.

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#35

Post by belorn »

falcolas wrote: post #16

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…

I normally associate DBA with efficiency and performance of data storage. However, you comment describes a blend between that, and a security administrator who's job include the creation and maintenance of high availability plans, disaster recovery plans (like backups), and monitoring.

Do you think the overlapping speaks for the decrement of either profession specialization?

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#36

Post by dsr_ »

bluedino wrote: post #19
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…

It's not a matter of regulation. It's a matter of liability. As long as the company running the database-as-a-service won't accept full liability against breach of privacy for the information stored there by clients, clients can't store confidential information there.

And who wants to do that?

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#37

Post by dschiptsov »

If they define DBA as a guy who sit in a room 9-to-5 for a $100k+ salary, then, yes, there is a recession, you know. But usually (or rather unusually) DBA is an engineer, who could do much more than looking at EXPLAIN output and tune some variables once in a week.

I have been Informix DBA for years and I could tell that we were the strongest guys in a team, because in order to do our job we had to understand (abstract out of running system) the data-flows, access pattern (and especially locking issues), actual server's topology (disk controllers, channels, hard-drivers) data partitioning (where this or that table-space lives, what's else on this volume, this channel, this controller) what are the access patterns for each table, how indexes are utilized, etc.

We also have patched, compiled and installed all the required software (have you ever tried to compile Informix support into PHP4? you definitely should.)) and to teach coders how to use it, and then deal with access patterns of silly scripts, etc.

The claims that some crap like MongoDB (of all things!) service could replace skilled, productive, (but, yes, quite expensive) professionals is, of course, utter nonsense (what else we could expect from MongoDB?).

DBAs and Sysadmins (real ones, not these clowns who use nothing but chef or puppet and doesn't know how ./configure && make works) are becoming extinct purely from economical reasons, and all these cloud services, ironically, require even more knowledge to deal with, because all that virtualization crap messes everything up even more (google for redis on EC2 for a change).

Sadly, idiots are taking over the world slowly but steadily,)

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#38

Post by falcolas »

csmuk wrote: post #28
falcolas wrote: post #16

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…

I disagree. dedicated DBAs are on their way out. Databases are becoming pretty good at managing themselves and the marginal performance gains from tuning usually are easily offset by throwing bigger kit at the problem or throwing more cash at the plan you are on.

Often the act of throwing "bigger kit" at the problem requires specialized tuning of the DB to be able to take advantage of it.

More memory? Increase the buffer pool size.

Faster HDD? Tweak the settings that determine how many disk operations are attempted every second.

Bigger CPU? Figure out the point of diminishing returns on the number of CPU cores for your DB, and start sharding onto multiple DBs to make sure you can use all of the cores.

SAN? But I thought you wanted performance. ;)

Plus, what gives you the best DB kit for the buck? I could probably tell you that (I am a DBA, and get paid to answer those questions), but do you know? Do you know where to find out?

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#39

Post by baudehlo »

tbrownaw wrote: post #17
CrossWired wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a naive view of both DBAs and sysadmins these days. They both do much more than just keep things running. Sysadmin has mostly turned into opsdev. Same with DBA.

Re: The Database Administrator is dead

#40

Post by Shorel »

falcolas wrote: post #16

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…

> He needs someone to figure out how to make the cartesian product queries he's written into efficient queries.

I wish our DBAs were like that. I am a developer with Sublime Text. I have to make the queries fast. I have to design good indexes.

They can complain if a query is slow, but they never actually help to fix it. They only have to make and restore backups when disks die.

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