[bigfatkitten]

> Using RDS instead of self-installing SQL eliminates the need for an entire full time role for DB admin.

No it doesn't. The value in a skilled DB admin is not in keeping the DB up and running, because no special skills are required to do that; the DB admin is an expert in performance. They add considerable value in ensuring you get the most bang for your buck from your infrastructure.

A popular modern alternative to this of course is to throw more money at RDS until your performance problems go away.

[sgarland]

Amen. How this lie continues to be perpetuated as gospel is beyond me.

I can look at any company’s RDBMS who doesn’t have a full-time DB[A,RE] on staff and find ten things wrong very quickly. Duplicate indices, useless indices, suboptimal column types, bad or completely absent tuning, poor query performance…

It’s only when a company hits the top end of vertical scaling do they think, “maybe we should hire someone,” and the problem then is that some changes are extremely painful at that scale, and they don’t want to hear it.

[dangus]

Yes it does.

While you’re not wrong about DB admins being important for performance optimizations, RDS stops you from having an inexperienced administrator lose data in stupid ways.

I know because I used to be that stupid person. You don’t want to trust your company’s data to a generalist that you told to spin up a database they’ve never configured before (me) and hope they got good answers when they googled how to set up backups/snapshots/replication.