DZone
Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile
  • Manage Email Subscriptions
  • How to Post to DZone
  • Article Submission Guidelines
Sign Out View Profile
  • Post an Article
  • Manage My Drafts
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.
Log In / Join
Refcards Trend Reports Events Over 2 million developers have joined DZone. Join Today! Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile Manage Email Subscriptions Moderation Admin Console How to Post to DZone Article Submission Guidelines
View Profile
Sign Out
Refcards
Trend Reports
Events
Zones
Culture and Methodologies Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
Culture and Methodologies
Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering
AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture
Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding
Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance
Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
  1. DZone
  2. Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance
  3. DevOps and CI/CD
  4. DevOps and Automation Will Eliminate the DBA

DevOps and Automation Will Eliminate the DBA

Could this be the end of the DBA? One DBA weighs in.

Grant Fritchey user avatar by
Grant Fritchey
·
Jan. 18, 19 · Opinion
Like (6)
Save
Tweet
Share
14.74K Views

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

I’ve been reading about the death of the DBA ever since I first made the jump from full-time developer to full-time data professional. The first time I heard it was when SQL Server 7.0 was released. Did you know that SQL Server 7.0 was self-tuning? In fact, it was so self-tuning that the DBA is a relic of the past and no one will be paid for that kind of work anymore.

Right.

So, twenty years later, several versions of SQL Server with tons of improvement from back in the day, and I’m still working (and I hope you are, too). Object databases were going to eliminate the DBA. ORM tools were going to eliminate the DBA. Then, of course, NoSQL absolutely eliminated the DBA. In fact, it’s amazing that any of us are still employed with all the things that were going to make us obsolete and out of work.

Now, I’ve heard this: The automation inherent within DevOps will lead to the elimination of the administrator from most workforces.

Sigh.

Let’s talk about automation.

Automation Will Eliminate the DBA

I love DevOps. I love DevOps the most because of its focus on automation. While I try, over and over, to emphasize that the key to DevOps is your communication and environment, not tooling, tooling plays a factor. All the tooling in a well-run DevOps process is in support of automating that process and then monitoring it. So, is that going to eliminate the DBA?

One of the reasons I love DevOps so much is because I’ve done it successfully. I’ve worked on teams that built fully-automated deployment mechanisms to get code from Dev to Production. Further, we automated the creation of dev and test servers. We automated the creation of production servers too. We automated the heck out of everything.

And then they fired me…

Kidding.

When we started building our DevOps processes, I was supporting two development teams. As we got better at automating our work, I was supporting three teams. By the time we had fully automated all the various processes, I was supporting between five and seven teams at different levels.

In short, automation changed where I spent my time, certainly. Instead of lots of work getting the right script to deploy from dev to QA, I was spending more time tuning, picking indexes, all sorts of other work. However, at no point was I eliminating myself from my job.

Fear of DevOps

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), can be a great driver for human decisions. FUD is frequently fundamental to resistance to change. “Ah, a new thing. It’s scary. It won’t work. It’s not how we always do things.” Ta-da! Now I don’t have to pay attention to DevOps.

If it was possible to completely automate the DBA out of a job, then we really don’t need DBAs. However, automation isn’t going to eliminate a really skilled DBA. Instead, automation does two things.

First, your job becomes creating, maintaining, and improving that automation you built. Like any other program, it’s not written once, it’s perfect, nothing needs to be fixed or changed or improved. No, there’s lots of work around the automation that has to be done.

Second, automation frees you from drudgery. Instead of having to do dull work, you automate it. Now, your time frees up to do other things and those other things will absolutely fill your time. You’ll be tuning, designing, troubleshooting, all new and better databases. You’ll be adding additional systems like CosmosDB to your work. Automation removes thoughtless, repetitive tasks. It replaces them with tasks that require thought, that aren’t repetitive, that are more challenging and more interesting.

What’s more, by automating tasks, you make your production environment safer. Sure, you can automate stupid stuff. Don’t do that. Instead, you ensure that tasks are properly scripted so that they run one way, ever time. This is added protection.

There is no reason to fear automation unless you really think that your job should be to do simple tasks that should be automated away. Please tell me you’re not manually running all your backups? You’re not, right? That’s automated. You’ve automated consistency checks, too, right? You’ve automated index maintenance and a host of other processes, right? When did any of these make it so the company didn’t need to bother paying you? What’s that? They found more work for you to do?

Exactly.

Conclusion

I think people can honestly debate whether or not following DevOps practices is a good thing. I think you’re wrong if you’re against them, but I can understand how people might resist it. However, I don’t think there’s any way in the world to honestly debate that automation is a good thing. No, the only reason people resist automation is because of unreasoning fear, crippling uncertainty, and doubts that prevent action. Break away from fear, uncertainty, and doubt and you can actively embrace automation. Embracing automation will make you much more valuable to your employers. Automation and DevOps will not eliminate the DBA.

DevOps

Published at DZone with permission of Grant Fritchey, DZone MVB. See the original article here.

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Popular on DZone

  • How to Submit a Post to DZone
  • Microservices Discovery With Eureka
  • 7 Awesome Libraries for Java Unit and Integration Testing
  • What Is a Kubernetes CI/CD Pipeline?

Comments

Partner Resources

X

ABOUT US

  • About DZone
  • Send feedback
  • Careers
  • Sitemap

ADVERTISE

  • Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

  • Article Submission Guidelines
  • Become a Contributor
  • Visit the Writers' Zone

LEGAL

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

CONTACT US

  • 600 Park Offices Drive
  • Suite 300
  • Durham, NC 27709
  • support@dzone.com
  • +1 (919) 678-0300

Let's be friends: