[drdexebtjl]

> hiring at least a couple of DBAs and get more flexibility

Every place I’ve ever worked at that had DBAs had the complete opposite of more flexibility. You have to do things the DBA’s way, and if their way doesn’t work for your service, you need to fight for their time and priority.

Meanwhile every place I worked at where every team completely owned their databases + did periodic data recovery drills had much more flexibility and no data loss.

[sgarland]

That’s usually because they’ve seen a lot of failure modes over the years, and what seems fine to you can have surprising outcomes later.

My personal experience has been the opposite of yours: lots of data inconsistency issues, data loss only resolved by the database team spinning up backups, etc. And somehow, even after yet another incident, there’s never been appetite to properly fix things.

[skullone]

Now you have lots of DBs all probably operating inefficiently with only periodic recovery testing. This is the stuff DBAs do every day, and you're "hasn't happened to us... yet". You'll be just another lesson someday

[drdexebtjl]

Are you saying DBAs would be doing _continuous_ recovery testing? That’s not even a thing that exists.

Managed databases don’t lose customer data. They would be sued and lose, and if word got out, they would lose their customers. They are optimized for the machines they run on. The proprietary tooling from AWS for managing HA clusters, doing blue-green upgrades and monitoring for slow queries is all miles ahead of the open source tooling available for self-managed databases.

There’s nothing left for the DBA to do.

[skullone]

DBAs in orgs who resource their data teams indeed do constant validation of recovery. I know many DBAs who are in more demand than ever due to the rise of managed databases. If you don't need a DBA, you aren't at a scale or maturity just yet. That you're so dismissive of this role, I have to dismiss your entire opinion because you simply don't grasp the scale of large databases

[drdexebtjl]

>constant validation of recovery

So the same thing I said we do, a periodic validation of recovery, but with an acceptably short period.

SWEs can do that too. They can even write software to do most of it automatically.

They went through systems design interviews to ensure they know how to scale without picking technology choices that require a dedicated human caretaker.

It’s the opposite. Needing a DBA to operate a completely managed database is a sign of not enough maturity.

[skullone]

DBAs write software to do this too. You think DBAs are just clicking around in some gui? Hate to break it to you, but every field has done leaps and bounds over the decades too. SWEs can certainly "learn the trade" as a DBA can "learn to code" their own tooling as well, but you realize people specialize, there's fields of practice and domain experts. One of the greatest inventions is the division of labor and specialization.

[dwedge]

> There’s nothing left for the DBA to do.

And yet here we still are