[lmm]

My first job was at a company that made the UK's fastest growing list something like five times in a row. Eight years after being founded by two guys in their college room it was sold for GBP100m.

Prior to that sale we never had a dedicated DBA. Our two and a half sysadmins kept MySQL up to date and handled the replication setup for teams that didn't want to do it themselves (which was perhaps 2/3). Table layout and query optimization were left entirely up to developers.

It worked far better than the setup at either of my subsequent jobs, which have been postgres and oracle with dedicated DBAs.

[einhverfr]

What do you think the job of a DBA is?

I have one customer who has a couple of sysadmins do all that for both MySQL and PostgreSQL servers. If that's all you need, you probably don't need a dedicated DBA unless you are running Oracle and that's just because with Oracle your DBA can always find something to do.

If MySQL can be said to make DBA's obsolete because it doesn't take that much maintenance, Informix beat them to that by a few decades.

[lmm]

>If MySQL can be said to make DBA's obsolete because it doesn't take that much maintenance, Informix beat them to that by a few decades.

Right, but is that true for Postgres? If companies that use MySQL generally don't employ dedicated DBAs, and companies that use Postgres generally do, then it's fair to say this might result in some bias when dedicated DBAs compare the two.

[einhverfr]

My sense is that companies choosing to use Postgres are more likely to have dedicated DBA's before Postgres is deployed. In these companies the move to Postgres is often DBA-initiated.

In general, though, DBA can mean a bunch of things. It can range from a dev-ops kind of role to something like a sysadmin kind of role and a bunch of things in between. One thing I think we see industry-wide is that strict specialization in DBA tasks seems to be on the decline and for good reasons. It is a move I think from a strictly parts-oriented, details-centric operations approach to a big-picture, approach where the ability to communicate across teams is helpful.

Also regarding the BIG users of Postgres, the DBA-like people I have known who have worked there have been part-time DBA's and part-time C programmers doing things like porting Postgres to new platforms or building new replication systems. As far as I can tell, the dedicated "nothing-but-a-dba" is something that exists mostly waning.