DBA employment is expected to have increased by 11% in 2026:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment of database administrators (DBAs) is projected to grow 9 percent from 2018 to 2028, faster than the average for all occupations. Growth in this occupation will be driven by the increased data needs of companies in all sectors of the economy. Database administrators will be needed to organize and present data in a way that makes it easy for analysts and other stakeholders to understand.
As you can see from the DBA job outlook article, the employment of DBAs in the computer systems design and related services industry is projected to grow 21 percent from 2018 to 2028.
In a new study from Intellipaat, the top IT skills required for a high-flying career are Big Data, Data Science, Business Intelligence and ETL, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle Developer and Administrator, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Python Developers, and Blockchain Developers. Oracle DBA/Developer is #6 on the list – followed by Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence.
Most of us have been witnessing this strange phenomenon in the IT world where anything successful must have been decided from the top and pushed down. In reality, most innovative concepts are implemented by teams at lower levels in the organizations, like the DBA teams, and afterwards successfully proven to be among the best decisions taken within the company. Example: automation. This is nothing new. But now it has been become more fashionable than ever.
Database innovation in IT is often perceived as jumping from one database brand to another or creating/adding new features into a new database brand. Although that might be true to a certain extent, database innovation is a long, incremental process taking years of research, testing and series of software improvements.
Autonomous databases are an evolution of the database software, part of the progress. Like the cost based optimizer did not radically change the way we write SQL statements, automation will not (and is not) radically changing the way DBAs work on daily basis.
In less than 7 minutes, Connor McDonald answers the most typical DBA question nowadays about the future of autonomous: Does this mean an autonomous database will be free from me and my DBA career?
It is impossible to predict what is going to happen, all is up to speculations. Just have a look at something that was written on dba-oracle.com about 15 years go. Oracle 17-3d did not introduce the time dimension to database management, allowing three-dimensional data representation. And as of 2019, there are no computers on the market that are inherently 128-bit machines.
And how many times can you find the word Cloud in the article above: “Oracle 2020: A Glimpse Into the Future of Database Management”?
These ten article cover the subject in depth:
– Autonomous Database: A DBA’s New Best Friend?
– 2019 Data Management Predictions: Oracle Autonomous Database is in your future
– The DBA’s Role and Oracle Autonomous Database
– Every DBA Needs to Understand the Impacts of Oracle Autonomous Database
– Oracle’s next chapter: The Autonomous Database and the DBA
– Will automated databases kill the DBA position?
– A Veteran DBA’s Insights On Oracle’s New Autonomous Data Warehouse
– The Autonomous Database Wants to Eat Your Lunch (and maybe your job)
– Oracle: the autonomous database drives the ‘evolution’ of the DBA
– Oracle Autonomous Database features free DBAs from routine tasks
Bottom line, DBA will still be needed in the autonomous future for (at least) these tasks (in no order whatsoever):
– database recovery
– data security
– user management
– data migration between environments
– capacity planning and sizing
– database provisioning
– scaling, starting, stopping the db services
– monitoring
– performance tuning
– automate more and more .. and more
– migrate databases from non-Oracle brands to ADB 🙂
“The long-term future of database administrators could be at risk if every enterprise adopts the Oracle 18c autonomous database”: very, very long-term indeed!
Once more and finally – all comes from people, not from AI and SW – let me quote LJE: “What is Oracle? A bunch of people. And all of our products were just ideas in the heads of those people – ideas that people typed into a computer, tested, and that turned out to be the best idea for a database or for a programming language.” Larry Ellison
Take your time! Linear thinking based on a limited short term perspective does not derive database innovation. In reality, innovation is a set of small steps that eventually lead up to a big deal that changes the game. Like the Autonomous Database.
Julian Dontcheff's Database Blog 