The term DBA changes all the time and what it means from shop to shop varies. I have always considered myself a generalist as I can write C#/VB.Net ( and enjoy it ) and dont think that Windows is the latest virus released from China.

One position I had this was considered a positive. In the next position it was a negative as I would told at review time I was not specializing enough. In my next position it didnt matter as the DB Team was thought of by all others as slowing everyone down as we insisted that the developers test the code before putting it in production, that our management give us the infrastructure that we needed to be up 24/7 and support tens of thousands of users from around the world, that we be in on architecture decisions for the next version of our system, that we not get woken up every night with applications and network problems, that we only maybe work 5-6 days a week and be able to work less than 60 hours a week. We were seen as troublemakers due to these simple requests.

One shop wants you be an Oracle guru and Linux Systems Admin while the next wants you to know Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and Ingres and be able to do production support on all in Sun, Windows and Linux environments and to be able to back up the System Admin and Storage Admin when they arent available.

The good old days of working on an IBM 4381 on MVS with COBOL and IMS seem so long ago but so much simpler than today. Guess that dates me huh ? 🙂