In the days of cloud computing and agile development, it might seem that being a DBA is somewhat less appealing as a career choice. However, the role of DBA is changing; it is not going away. In fact, it is becoming even more important. That said, if DBAs are to explain their value to the rest of the business, they must be seen as more than the company’s data librarians. Rather than belonging in a musty old library, DBAs should be responsible for creating the foundations to turn their organizations into high-performance businesses fit for the digital era. This means addressing a number of technical requirements, but above all, it boils down to how fast an organization can use its data to gain business-impacting insights. To achieve this, DBAs must retool their query optimizing skills to become data performance pros!