"Backups, indexing, jobs, monitoring, and performance tuning are still core skills"

You better believe it. it was true ten years ago, it was true 20 years ago, it was true 30 years ago. How do I know? Been there, still there.

It may change, as to how you do these things, but it is still as important today as it was then, and will remain so, no matter how technology changes.

"The amount of data we manage increases, and the number of DBA’s managing it decreases"

Ain't that the truth.

Are we having fun yet?

Leonard