The DBA is dead

In the era of the Internet of Things and big data, the rapidly growing amount of data is becoming an increasingly critical component for all applications. (Cloud) applications have become the user interface for delivering data to mobile devices. These applications rely on complex geographical or social designs, require extremely high scalability and performance, need easy-to-use APIs, and must never stop.

These new complex data types, core API designs, and demands for scalability have led to the emergence of a completely new type of data storage. You've probably heard of NoSQL, right? However, data storage as a service in the cloud hasn't become as popular as application as a service. The main reason is that running data storage is much more difficult than hosting an application stack.

Moreover, issues with static data and the trust concerns around entrusting data to cloud service providers are also challenging. But this is changing. Rackspace offers MySQL services, Redis To Go, and ObjectRocket. Amazon provides RDS and Dynamo. There are also players focusing on niche markets like Cloudant (a NoSQL cloud database) and Clustrix.

Unless your company is as large as Facebook or Apple, adopting a data storage-as-a-service solution can provide real value. First, developers instantly gain access to many critical features, allowing them to forget about other things and focus on API interactions.

In this model, the developer becomes the DBA, making the traditional specialized DBA role obsolete. Developers no longer need to worry about fragmentation, index rebuilding, or data file space issues; they can leave those to disks, RAID, Ubuntu kernel versions, etc., handing over all those problems to the provider.