The Database Administrator is dead
thenextweb.com
The Database Administrator is dead
1–10 of 78 posts
Re: The Database Administrator is dead
#2The 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.
Re: The Database Administrator is dead
#3I think someone's spent too long in tech-startup-land and has forgotten that there's a whole bunch of businesses outside of that, some of which don't have access to reliable internet connectivity and need to keep going even if the Internet's down.
Re: The Database Administrator is dead
#4The DBA is essential for big companies, not only Facebook or Apple. The author of the post works for a database-as-a-service provider, it's just marketing.
Re: The Database Administrator is dead
#5DBAs have specialized knowledge related to the maintenance and optimization of a particular SQL engine. Developers see the database as a black box where data gets stored, but there is a lot going on under-the-hood to keep the data reliable, consistent, secure, redundant, and available.
The last thing you want is a full transaction log during peak hours.
Re: The Database Administrator is dead
#6If 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.
Re: The Database Administrator is dead
#7The 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 that bar has been getting higher for years.
What we really need is to demystify DB performance, which for the most part is fairly simple.
What you need to do is teach your developers how to read those query plans. Show them how to find the expensive queries. To give them tools to easily see what queries their ORM is spitting out. To show them how to use a SQL profiler.
Tell your developers how query plan caching actually works. How a clustered index works and what you should and shouldn't put it on. Explain how indexes work. Explain how DB pages actually work and then it's obvious why certain indexes are a bad idea. Explain how relational keys are very important for the DB engine and leaving them off is not an 'oops', it's a serious mistake with long term consequences.
And that's at most a few days work. So why do you need that DBA?
Aside from that you need someone who knows how to maintain a DB, but again that's not particularly complicated and once it's done you can forget about it apart from the occasional sanity check that it's all working properly.
Re: The Database Administrator is dead
#8The 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…
So basically train them to be DBAs?
Re: The Database Administrator is dead
#9The DBA is essential for big companies, not only Facebook or Apple. The author of the post works for a database-as-a-service provider, it's just marketing.
Exactly.. Why bother optimizing your database, just spin up more servers (which we will happily continue to squeeze your opex budget dry)!
It seems cloud/SaaS is the new answer to throwing hardware at the problem. Something about the inefficiency grinds at me. I do get at certain scales, it makes sense.. But it's not always obvious where that line is.
Re: The Database Administrator is dead
#10The 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…
"DBA often never has sufficient domain knowledge"
"often never"?
I've met some DBAs who were quite versed in the business domain. And some that weren't. This is no different to the majority of the developers I run in to, so I'm not sure why you're drawing a line there, except that the article was about database stuff.