Today we have a guest editorial as Steve is away from the office.

Hey DBA, your role is changing!

In case you haven't noticed, the role of the DBA is changing. More and more companies are implementing practices to develop a DevOps culture. Yes, a culture. Although some people might think you can "implement" DevOps, you can't.

DevOps builds a culture as you implement DevOps practices like cross-functional teams, automation, and standardization. With these practices you automatically create a need to collaborate more with colleagues that have different jobs: developers, testers, system engineers, etc. That's what DevOps is all about: collaboration.

Maybe your company has implemented DevOps practices already, maybe it is implementing them now. Either way, as a DBA, you have to adapt. So how can you start changing? Go to one of your developers, or heck, attend one of their meetings and ask them: "How would you like me to collaborate with you?". It's an open question and you probably get a lot of different answers. This is an opportunity for you to learn and, as a side effect, I'm sure it will be appreciated by your developers.

Do this at other team meetings, for example, the operations team meeting, the QA team meeting , or a cross-functional team meeting.

Does this mean all of your DBA tasks change? No, of course not. Your primary responsibility is still to protect your company's data. You still have to make your backups, test them, secure your database instances, et cetera. But do it in a smart way. Automate as much as possible, so you can free up time to collaborate with your colleagues. Maybe to help them automate even more!

It's fun, I promise.

Sjors Takes is a DBA with AlbumPrinter and blogs at http://devopsdba.com