The DBA of the Future

What will the life of a DBA look like in 10 years? That’s a hard question to answer because the job of a DBA varies so much, but let’s gaze into the future anyway and see what we see!

In 10 years:

• Backups, indexing, jobs, monitoring, and performance tuning are still core skills
• We choose between local and cloud storage based on business needs, not features
• Virtualization is the default configuration even for high performance servers
• We learn to forget about RAID and IOPS, just provisioning storage based on space and response time
• We’re serious about securing data, with encryption every where
• BI skills (SSIS, SSAS, more) become a must have
• The amount of data we manage increases, and the number of DBA’s managing it decreases
• It’s twice as hard to get an entry level job as a DBA than it is now due to the deep skill set required

It’s hard to separate our skills from the technology entirely, but think about the ‘what’ of your job 10 years from now. What will you be doing that’s different from today?