I've had the privilege of being a database administrator for a long time, and have gotten the opportunity to work with many different databases on lots of different platforms. And throughout my long career (man, I feel old saying that...) and the various tech shifts (mainframe, client/server, web, etc.) that have occurred, every now and then you'll get people saying how a certain technology will make the DBA's job obsolete. Now, there's some talk in the press/on the web that predicts the cloud will remove the need for DBA's, especially system-level DBA's. Baloney. I was recently asked to write an article on how the cloud will change the way DBA's will work, which just got posted. Of course, as you'd expect, there are indeed some changes that are taking place with the deployment of cloud databases. The good news is many of these changes will prove to take some of the drudgery out of the DBA's day and let them focus on things that really matter. The bad news is the cloud brings some challenges that the DBA doesn't have to deal with as much behind their own data center firewall. But, in the end, will an organization be able to send their DBA packing just because they moved their database to the cloud? Not a chance. Give the article a read and let me know what you think.
