[goldfishcaura]

It amazes me how quickly our industry has forgotten the need for DBAs. With these MongoDBs, MPP cloud dbs and Hadoops, everyone seems to have assumed that engineers can now do all db work. This is reflected in the titles too: Data "Engineer".

But from my perspective, this is delusional. There is a lot that goes into DBA's experience that is not solved by the performance improvements in databases over the past decade. But there are more choices. 20-30 years ago, you would have been forced to write code on Oracle and you would have asked for help before deciding how to structure the data. Today, with more choices, you just read some online opinions, and jump on it without any internal resource to guide you.

Not saying the world of Oracle was great, but the young on this thread (me included) would benefit from respecting the experience of the old.

[yeukhon]

I agree. The issue I see is it's pretty tough to hire very good DBA that knows the new cool technologies to be very honest. I've worked with some DBAs but they have no experience with Cassandra or whatever !MySQL !Postgres !Oracle !SQL, and they also have very difficult time integrating themselves with the developers. It turns out the developers have better understanding of Cassandra than the DBAs and DevOps/Ops. As Ops we just learn from them and from incidents.... Good DBAs also tend to do a lot of testing and development besides reading manual and utilizing past experiences.

[droidist2]

> everyone seems to have assumed that engineers can now do all db work

Yes, everyone wants "full stack" and so you have a bunch of people haphazardly adorning themselves with the "full stack" label.