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In the noughties being an Oracle DBA was an aspirational role, technologists were drawn to the high earning potential, data environments were complex, temperamental and required a lot of attention to keep the lights on. I sold Oracle training courses in the late 90\u2019s and I booked swathes of bright young things onto the Oracle admin courses. Fast forward to last month and I was at a graduate recruitment fair looking to grab their impressionable minds early and divert them to the dark path of the DBA. Wow, what an eye opener! I lost track of the number of conversations I had with wannabe developers, it was like a factory producing coders in object orientated\u00a0languages. That I\u2019m afraid is the harsh reality and there is a widening skills gap for good and forward looking database skills.<\/p>\n
In terms of existing DBA\u2019s\u2026I\u2019m not going to waffle on about digital transformation and cloud migration, it’s happening and it’s having a big impact on a DBA\u2019s day to day world. Let me illustrate what I see happening with a story ;o)<\/p>\n
Scene 1: The Board Room<\/strong><\/p>\n The Board: Our sales are slowing down and we are meeting increased competition. How on earth did we lose \u201cplum account\u201d to \u201cannoying start-up\u201d?.<\/em><\/p>\n Sales Director: \u201cplum account\u201d has a new CIO and they chose \u201cannoying start-up\u201d as it\u2019s half the price and they deliver their services via an easy to use SaaS<\/em>.<\/p>\n The Board: But our customers value our very expensive staff turning every cog and we spent \u00a31m on that complex ETL project to integrate with “Dinosaur Ltd” to speed up the supply chain.<\/em><\/p>\n Sales Director: We are struggling to compete on price with \u201cannoying startup\u201d and the customers actually like their SaaS approach, apparently they can be up and running in a few hours.<\/em><\/p>\n Chairman: <Spits out tea> We need a SaaS approach. If we don\u2019t have a good story to tell our customers and investors then we could be the next Kodak or Blockbuster.<\/em><\/p>\n CIO:\u00a0 Excellent (I’m imagining in the voice of Mr Burns) I will call this new project \u201cDigital Transformation\u201d and I will hire an army of developers.<\/em><\/p>\n Scene 2: The arrival of the developers<\/strong><\/p>\n CIO: Right.. recruitment manager I need to build a new development team, we need to out cool \u201cannoying start-up\u201d, paint the IT department in bright colours, buy a table tennis table and if a developer doesn\u2019t have a piercing or a tattoo \u2026. Move on.<\/em><\/p>\n <The development team is born><\/p>\n CIO: To development head. I\u2019m under pressure on this I want you get all over the team. I need something new every 2 weeks, I want you to run a meeting every morning (don\u2019t even let them sit down) get them to explain what they did yesterday, what they have planned and what\u2019s stopping them. They\u2019ll hate the micro-management \u2013 but you\u2019ll have to convince them.<\/em><\/p>\n Dev Head: Guys, I convinced the CIO to go Agile.<\/em><\/p>\n Devs: Yey.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n OK \u2013 let\u2019s fast forward a little\u2026. Here\u2019s what happens:<\/p>\n I\u2019m laughing writing this as I see it happening time and time again. The DBA team have a gun to their head and they are being hit from all angles, poor SQL, new database technologies, new platforms, changes every 2 weeks etc\u2026 Those pesky devs are taking over, the penny has dropped with the infrastructure team who are changing their titles to DevOps and learning EC2 and Chef.<\/p>\n If you are DBA and watching this happen, sat looking after an internal Oracle backend to an ERP system\u2026 wakey, wakey you are supposed to be in charge of the data operations. The board could move the ERP system to a SaaS platform next year and I guarantee you that\u2019s what Oracle will be pushing for.<\/p>\n\n
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