[cygwin98]

Most DBAs these days are grown internally from developers or system administrators who decide to (or are forced to) specialize while on the job.

I agree with you on above statement. Though my conclusion is different from yours. I think in the future the line among DBA/SysAdmin/Developers will become even more blurred , developers will be trained/required to take over more and more work from DBA and sysadmin (DevOps anyone?); consequently, the demand for dedicated roles such as DBA and sysadmins will diminish. Hope I am wrong though.

[falcolas]

My role within our DBA group is that of devops exactly (after spending a year as a line DBA).

Given that background I still think that the topic of databases is just too deep for a generalist. I know a lot about the MySQL database (and a little about PostgreSQL), enough to write failover software, automate deployments, write guardian crons which slap down problematic queries & pre-emptively, automate backups, do vip failover and haproxy configuration... and I still have to go to my boss for most of the hard questions.

His knowledge encapsulates 12 years of working with and around MySQL, and it's proven invaluable to our customers. Knowing when to force certain optimizations, how to make subqueries run O(1) vs O(n), how to rebuild a complete database from binary logs, how to configure MySQL to work with SSD caches... these problems don't come up often, but when they do, not having a DBA available to you means contracting out to one at exorbitant rates.

It's the difference between a few minutes of downtime when the proverbial dung hits the fan, versus a few hours or days.