VictorSQL (12/6/2013)
It would appear that a 'Database Administrator' is whatever the organization wants you to be for the role and goals to be accomplished.In a 10-year period, I had worked for various organizations as a 'Senior Systems Administrator'. However, my role in each of those companies included database administration, and sometimes network administration or applications support. Today, I am noticing that there is a "blending" of roles such that there is no "ideal" database administrator position. One has to be "multi-lingual" when it comes to interfacing with internal customers, whether they are part of the database, systems, application, and business analyst teams.
The role of system administrator and database administrator are blended, perhaps more so in recent years due to corporate downsizing and staff shuffling. However, going forward I think that the two roles will start to diverge again as databases move to 3rd party hosted cloud environments or even in-house data warehouse appliances like Netezza or SQL Server PDW that are 3rd party supported. The DBA will lose his sysadmin privillages to the physical environment and instead take on more roles at the business intelligence level. But of course there will always be plenty of us who have remote server console open in one window and a SQL query window open in another.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho