Keeping tabs on the way emerging technologies and paradigms impact foundational roles—namely, the DBA—is crucial toward adapting. Shifts in the cloud, automation, and AI have significant implications for the DBA, forcing the persona to evolve away from routine maintenance and more towards strategic decision-making.
DBTA’s latest webinar, The Role of the DBA in 2025: Changes, Challenges, and Opportunities, featured experts from Pythian, Informatica, and NetApp by Instaclustr, offering guidance for IT decision-makers and database professionals as they approach a new—yet somewhat familiar—year in data.
Paul Lewis, chief technology officer, Pythian, explained that, despite technology’s endless and chaotic evolution, a core challenge remains the same—data is messy, siloed, and all over the place. With the impact of AI being incredibly widespread—from customer services to human resources and operations to the supply chain—focusing on foundational data problems is critical toward AI success.
As a philosophy, Pythian believes that operational databases provide that data foundation for building enterprise generative AI (GenAI) apps, according to Lewis. And, “if that’s true, then the role of the DBA changes to empower the building out of enterprise GenAI apps.”
Ultimately, said Lewis, the role of the DBA is changing, now consisting of being a cloud data manager; a data automation developer; an insight platform manager; a data security steward. Lewis further broke down each of these roles, detailing the newfound responsibilities that DBAs are tasked with handling.
Like Lewis, Rameez Ghous, senior product marketing manager, Informatica, asserted that while the world of data and its technology is evolving, the fragmented landscape of applications, data, and people grows in tandem. DBAs—previously responsible for troubleshooting, patch management, capacity planning, and database design—are now in charge of cloud migrations, security and compliance, data governance, DevOps and FinOps, and more. Compounded with a massive, evolving data community, DBAs are highly burdened with modernity.
Ghous argued that connected data management is a key enabler for DBA success, acting as the “DBA’s friend amidst the chaos.” To address each need involving governance, quality, and data access management, a connected data management platform enables DBAs to inhabit a strategic role, shaping an enterprise’s technological strategies without needing to worry about foundational data challenges.
Anil Inamdar, head of professional services, NetApp by Instaclustr, further delved into common challenges facing DBAs, which include:
- Managing complexity with multiple databases (SQL, NoSQL, NewSQL, Graph, etc.)
- Keeping up with automation and needing to learn new tools (e.g., Terraform, Kubernetes, AI-powered tuning)
- Security and compliance, protecting against breaches and ensuring compliance (GDPR, HIPAA, etc.)
- Balancing cost and performance, optimizing cloud spending while maintaining performance
While challenges are certainly abundant, so too are opportunities, according to Inamdar. DBAs have the chance to become cloud database architects; data governance and security leaders; DevOps and DataOps champions; and strategic partners influential in business decision-making.
To achieve this, Inamdar outlined his “call to action” for DBAs:
- Embrace cloud and multi-cloud databases.
- Invest in automation and AI skills.
- Learn DevOps and DataOps practices.
- Develop strong data governance and security expertise.
- Become a business partner, not just a technician.
This is only a snippet of the full DBTA webinar. To view the full webinar, featuring in-depth explanations, a roundtable discussion, and more, you can view an archived version here.