DBA for future

  • I have a feeling that future DBA will know as many DB system as possible, at least the top several db system, like SQL server, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, NoSQL database like Mongodb etc since in the future all the dbs may run on Cloud, we can choose whatever we need, or whatever works best for our working place.  What is best resources or website to learn and keep our skills updated for the need as a DBA?

    And how far we are away from all or most of dbs hosted in Cloud? I'm particular interested those places for education organizations like universities, or schools?

  • I can't answer your questions but I will offer a bit of advice... remember the phrase "Jack of all trades and Master of NONE" when it comes to databases.  Yes, it's possible to learn the particular SQL dialect that each uses and it is possible to learn how to manage all of them but, if you spread yourself so thin, you may not be adequate for the tasks on all of them.  Certainly it will be a major chore to keep up with the changes in all of them and that could become a full time job of its own.

     

    As for what are the "best resources or websites to learn and keep our skills updated as a DBA"?  The answer is "Yabingooglehoo" and the right drive, attitude, and time spent to do the research.  Heh... as they say... "If you don't take the time, you won't be able to walk the line". 😉

    --Jeff Moden


    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.


    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

  • Most businesses seem to be moving to, or have long been in, a hybrid situation with more than one database management system, some things in the cloud, some things local. I think if you toss in containers to this mix, that's what we're going to be dealing with for the next 5-10 years. As Jeff notes, some specialization is still going to be necessary in order to deal with the harder problems. You just can't know enough about everything to be able to deal with some issues if all you know is a very broad swath of information with very little depth. That said, I would recommend having knowledge of more than one system. The biggest key is going to be learning automation.

    "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
    - Theodore Roosevelt

    Author of:
    SQL Server Execution Plans
    SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

  • The article is really nice and interesting. I have searched for this type of information and would love to read this information. I hope you will share more useful articles like that. Thanks for sharing!

    https://fireboyand-watergirl.com/

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 12 months ago by  rolltheballaz.
  • rolltheballaz wrote:

    The article is really nice and interesting. I have searched for this type of information and would love to read this information. I hope you will share more useful articles like that. Thanks for sharing!

    Man, stop spamming (links removed from my reply) and get a real job.

    --Jeff Moden


    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.


    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

  • Thanks, I would agree with both of you.

    I think just master  the systems your current place using or if you want to move, master most popular systems that could be used in next company.  For containers, you said it could be what will be used in next 5-10 years. It sounds a long time, if so definitely need to learn. About automation, do you mean to automate what we can as a DBA, but does that also mean it could automate us out of  job? 🙂

     

  • Containers are exploding right. I mean they're going to be the go-to tech for the next 5-10 years, especially within Dev/Test.

    I've never seen anyone successfully automate themselves out of a job. Automation becomes the job.

    "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
    - Theodore Roosevelt

    Author of:
    SQL Server Execution Plans
    SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

  • No... automating things that a DBA does will NOT "automate you out of a job".  On the contrary... it will make you even more valuable because you'll have time to do code reviews, find poorly performing code and fix it or help fix it, have "Lunch'n'Learns" for Developers (and others) to teach them how to write better code for both general programming and esoteric needs, figure out things like which tables should be partitioned, how to properly do index maintenance (the 10/30 rule is wrong in a lot of cases), and much more.  You might even get yourself invited to design meetings.

    --Jeff Moden


    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.


    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

  • For containers, I feel it is more a developer thing, that makes their development platform easier ,quicker, portable. For production environment, for DBA to maintain, are we going to also use a lot of docker/containers?

  • Grant, well said... Having worked with cloud and SQL DBA work, I found learning Powershell is a must. Anyone deals with cloud and managing different flavors of RDMS needs to know how to write PS scripts to automate processes. As for resources, I rely on youtube and blogs.

  • lsalih wrote:

    Grant, well said... Having worked with cloud and SQL DBA work, I found learning Powershell is a must. Anyone deals with cloud and managing different flavors of RDMS needs to know how to write PS scripts to automate processes. As for resources, I rely on youtube and blogs.

     

    You need to be really careful... there's some real junk in 'tubes and blogs.  A "favorite" example of that is when people say that it's a "Best Practice" to use rCTEs (Recursive CTEs) that count incrementally in a RBAR fashion (including making dates, etc, etc).

     

    As my Dad used to tell me when I was a kid, "Half of everything ever written is wrong and the other half is written in such a fashion that you can't tell".

     

    As for PowerShell when it comes to SQL Server... I strongly recommend that you learn T-SQL a whole lot better first. 😉

    --Jeff Moden


    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.


    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

  • Jeff Moden wrote:

    lsalih wrote:

    Grant, well said... Having worked with cloud and SQL DBA work, I found learning Powershell is a must. Anyone deals with cloud and managing different flavors of RDMS needs to know how to write PS scripts to automate processes. As for resources, I rely on youtube and blogs.

     

    You need to be really careful... there's some real junk in 'tubes and blogs.  A "favorite" example of that is when people say that it's a "Best Practice" to use rCTEs (Recursive CTEs) that count incrementally in a RBAR fashion (including making dates, etc, etc).

     

    As my Dad used to tell me when I was a kid, "Half of everything ever written is wrong and the other half is written in such a fashion that you can't tell".

     

    As for PowerShell when it comes to SQL Server... I strongly recommend that you learn T-SQL a whole lot better first. 😉

    my reply:

    Absorbing some PowerShell isn't going to hurt anything, and its not going to prevent someone from progressing with SQL. Learning programming languages really requires an investment, so the sooner you dig in the better, having some PowerShell isn't going to hurt your SQL, and additionally, SQL itself is progressing so you'll never stop learning SQL anyways if you're smart.

    new edit:

    Looks like I'll have to also learn how to post and quote on the new SSC too 🙂

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by  x.
  • Didn't say that PowerShell was going to hurt abilities in T-SQL.  The problem is that a whole lot of people are using PowerShell instead of T-SQL to do things that are frequently easier to do in T-SQL.  Heh... I thought it strange when all the rage was to centralize backups using PowerShell and then watch log files explode when the single source machine they were doing backups from crashed.

    Learn both but, if you're going to work with SQL Server, don't forsake T-SQL for PowerShell.

    --Jeff Moden


    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.


    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

  • sqlfriend wrote:

    For containers, I feel it is more a developer thing, that makes their development platform easier ,quicker, portable. For production environment, for DBA to maintain, are we going to also use a lot of docker/containers?

    Yes. Look at container orchestrators like kubernetes. We're not all going to be running containers in production, but some of us will be.

    "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
    - Theodore Roosevelt

    Author of:
    SQL Server Execution Plans
    SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

  • x wrote:

    Jeff Moden wrote:

    lsalih wrote:

    Grant, well said... Having worked with cloud and SQL DBA work, I found learning Powershell is a must. Anyone deals with cloud and managing different flavors of RDMS needs to know how to write PS scripts to automate processes. As for resources, I rely on youtube and blogs.

      You need to be really careful... there's some real junk in 'tubes and blogs.  A "favorite" example of that is when people say that it's a "Best Practice" to use rCTEs (Recursive CTEs) that count incrementally in a RBAR fashion (including making dates, etc, etc).   As my Dad used to tell me when I was a kid, "Half of everything ever written is wrong and the other half is written in such a fashion that you can't tell".   As for PowerShell when it comes to SQL Server... I strongly recommend that you learn T-SQL a whole lot better first. 😉

    my reply: Absorbing some PowerShell isn't going to hurt anything, and its not going to prevent someone from progressing with SQL. Learning programming languages really requires an investment, so the sooner you dig in the better, having some PowerShell isn't going to hurt your SQL, and additionally, SQL itself is progressing so you'll never stop learning SQL anyways if you're smart. new edit: Looks like I'll have to also learn how to post and quote on the new SSC too 🙂

    I'm on board with learning both. T-SQL is vital, there's no question. However, automation is vital and you can't, in fact shouldn't, do some things within the OS with T-SQL.

    "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
    - Theodore Roosevelt

    Author of:
    SQL Server Execution Plans
    SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 15 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply