Headlines championing automation and the cloud may seem to confirm the DBA is dead, but in reality, that’s far from the case. Although many DBA tasks can be automated, there’s still a lot of strategy that DBAs must tackle, and with data underlying every application in your organization it’s more crucial than ever that your database environments are as available and optimized as possible.

In today’s age of digital transformation, DBAs need to be going beyond the basics to stay on top of new tools, infrastructures, and techniques to truly drive their businesses forward and gain a competitive advantage.

While the core tasks of the DBA (i.e. capacity planning, monitoring, security, performance tuning, etc.) haven’t changed significantly because of cloud architecture, what is changing is how those are performed as the technologies with which they are delivered transforms. Bottom line, database administrators whose expertise is 100% based on operational tasks need to broaden their skill set or they risk becoming obsolete.

Here’s how the core roles of the DBA have evolved with the adoption of new technologies. Today, the modern DBA manages:

Capacity Planning

With the increasing adoption of the cloud, modern DBAs provision only for what the business needs that day/month instead of provisioning for a piece of physical hardware that is supposed to last three to four years. Modern Database Administrators are also extremely aware of their organization’s demand cycles and make use of the bursting capability of cloud to successfully accommodate a surge in demand.

Performance Tuning

As more and more companies are leveraging the cloud in some capacity, modern DBAs are adapting to keep pace with how to optimize database performance, and are becoming extremely knowledgeable as new features are released each month in the cloud to provide valuable recommendations on what new functionalities can be used to increase database performance.

Monitoring

Enterprise applications are only getting more complex and simply monitoring generic performance levels isn’t enough. The modern DBA leverages various monitoring technologies and develop scripts and custom alerts that are application-specific.

Security

Security is a major concern for organizations today, especially those leveraging the cloud, and it will continue to be a major responsibility of the DBA. Today’s Database Administrators are very familiar with which parts of their databases hold sensitive data, and the change control and procedure measures in place that allow access to sensitive database resources.

The core tasks of the DBA will always be vital to the health of your database environments and they are only getting more complex with the introduction of new tools and infrastructures. Check out our new eBook, The Definitive Guide to Enterprise Database Management, to learn more about your available Oracle, SQL Server, or NoSQL database management options.