Major trends in technology are reshaping the role of the DBA at many organizations. The size and complexity of database systems continues to grow with higher data volumes, more workloads and an increasing rate of database deployments that need to be managed.
What’s more, new data types and emerging applications continue to drive the adoption of new types of databases.
DBAs are under constant pressure in a constantly evolving environment—fighting fires to keep the lights on while navigating the impact of cloud and automation on their daily jobs.
DBTA recently held a roundtable webinar with Krishna Kapa, senior solutions architect, Nutanix; Peter Albert, CISO, InfluxData; and Srinivasa Krishna, global practice lead and director, MySQL Services, Datavail, who discussed how IT decision makers and database professionals can tackle these changes.
Krishna said DBAs face database challenges such as agility and innovation, reliability, cost and effecieny, scalability, and security. Cloud is the future and DBAs need to understand:
- Cloud eco systems
- Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud approaches
- IaaS vs PaaS vs DBaaS vs Serverless
- Monolithic vs microservices
- Technologies with relational, big data, caching, graph, ledger, time series , etc.
- Choosing the right database - Database Modernization
- Databases on containers
DBAs need to Align Goals with Business, Align Goals with Future Career, identify Skills that Need Improvement, Train and Develop Skills, and master the cloud, Krishna said.
The database world is changing, Kapa explained. Day to day administrator tasks include provisioning new environments, cloning or refresh databases, backup and recovery, patching, migration and upgrades, and tuning and capacity management.
It can take hours, days, or weeks to do this with traditional database provisioning/cloning process, Kapa said. The process involves multiple teams, introduces friction and complex processes, lowers business agility, decreases innovation rate, and increases time to market.
With a focus on DBaaS, DBAs can gain elasticity, scalability, high availability, security, the ability to migrate to different platforms, and more.
According to Kapa, the Nutanix DBaaS for database operations offers one-click provisioning, database protection, patching, copy data management, and more.
Albert said there are now more databases than ever before. When boiling down what a DBA does he said it’s important to think about where the data is in an organization and how to protect it.
The cloud and the digital supply chain have changed the way DBA collect and protect information on a database, he said.
An archived on-demand replay of this webinar is available here.