23/3/2020 The Changing Role of the DBA in the Expanding Cloud World - Database Trends and Applications

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The Changing Role of the DBA in the Expanding

Cloud World

Apr 11, 2019

Joe McKendrick

Cloud computing—and
everything that goes with it
—is dramatically changing
the roles and aspirations of
database administrators. No NEWSLETTERS
longer do DBAs need to be
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chained to their databases, wrestling with managing updates, applying security patches, and dealing with
capacity issues. Moving to a cloud data environment is steadily shifting DBAs’ roles from hands-on database
overseers to value-drivers for their businesses—and enabling a range of career advancement opportunities SIGN UP
not seen since the dawn of relational databases.
RECENT BIG DATA QUARTERLY ISSUES
Overall, DBAs and their enterprises are embracing cloud computing in a big way. A recent survey conducted
by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., in partnership with Amazon Web Services, found BIG DATA QUARTERLY:
SPRING 2020 ISSUE
that, on average, 25% of organizations’ critical enterprise data is now managed in public clouds. In addition,
60% of data managers indicate their use of public cloud-based data resources and platforms has increased DATA SOURCEBOOK
(WINTER 2019) ISSUE
over the past year. Close to one-third anticipate growth exceeding 10% over the coming year (“2019 IOUG
Databases in the Cloud Survey”). BIG DATA QUARTERLY:
FALL 2019 ISSUE
Leading vendors in the database space are increasingly promoting cloud-based approaches that will transfer
BIG DATA QUARTERLY:
many DBA functions from on-premise data centers to cloud providers. This is the goal of Oracle, which sees SUMMER 2019 ISSUE
cloud-based “self-driving databases” doing much of the heavy lifting of enterprises, said Steve Daheb, senior
BIG DATA QUARTERLY: SPRING 2019 ISSUE
vice president of Oracle’s Cloud Business Group.

At the same time, DBAs will be busier than ever, engaging in designing and delivering data-driven capabilities SUBSCRIBE NOW
to their businesses. “The average DBA spends 90% of their time in maintenance, managing 50 databases
each,” he said. “They’re shifting now to higher-value tasks, from tuning and provisioning to focusing on WHITE PAPERS
business analytics. They see it as an opportunity.” The rise of cloud-based databases is also helping DBAs TUNGSTEN CLUSTERING
guide their organizations into new technology realms, such as blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), and AI, FOR MYSQL, MARIADB
AND PERCONA SERVER
he added. “It’s all cloud-based. For example, cloud is an enabler for IoT, because if you think about it, where
VERTICA IN THE CLOUDS
would you store all that data streaming in?” Oracle also sees greater engagement with non-technical business
users as well, he said. UNLOCK MACHINE
LEARNING FOR THE NEW
SPEED AND SCALE OF
Cloud means a number of changes to DBAs’ jobs, including the following. BUSINESS

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FOR EVERY DOLLAR SPENT

The growing importance of cloud-based data and databases frees up DBAs from mundane, day-to-day tasks, A BUYER’S GUIDE TO DATA WAREHOUSING IN THE
CLOUD
providing more time to work directly with business leaders, managers, and customers on ways data can be
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applied to business problems. Data clouds take out much of the grunt work involved in setting up, operating,

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23/3/2020 The Changing Role of the DBA in the Expanding Cloud World - Database Trends and Applications

and scaling enterprise databases, whether for production, development, or testing purposes. Cloud services WEBINARS
o er exible capacity that can be expanded or reduced on demand and provide automated management of
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lower-level tasks such as security patching, server provisioning, and backups. DBAs can then focus on UNICORN WITH MYSQL AND CONTINUENT
solutions and innovations to boost the e orts of their IT teams and business users to apply data analytics, AI, TUNGSTEN

and machine learning to problems and opportunities. THE FUTURE OF IOT: REAL-TIME, EDGE
COMPUTING AND 5G
MORE AUTONOMY, LESS HANDS-ON MAINTENANCE DATABASE HEROES - POWER UP SIMPLICITY AND
SPEED
DBAs are seeing their job roles—and perhaps even titles—change. Emerging roles, including that of
DATABASE MANAGEMENT TODAY: NEW
enterprise data architects, data stewards, and data engineers, provide new career paths for today’s data STRATEGIES AND TECHNOLOGIES
professionals. In addition, the cloud opens the way to DevOps, in which the work of developers and production DATABASE MANAGEMENT IN THE CLOUD ERA
teams is in sync, delivering quality software at a pace the business requires. This is being made possible
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through increasing database automation, with almost completely autonomous databases on the horizon.
There will be less of a requirement for DBAs to constantly be on the lookout for events—be they minor
glitches or patching requirements. The more autonomous databases become, the more events that can be
recti ed automatically. “The average enterprise gets 17,000 alerts a week, and only 19% are reliable and only
4% are ever investigated,” Daheb illustrated. “So you just have all of this noise.” A more autonomous database
employing AI will catch many of the false positive alerts and enable DBAs to focus on issues that are real and
of material importance to the business.

MORE DATA ENRICHMENT, LESS DATABASE

The always-on, data-driven enterprise doesn’t function on internal databases alone—competing in today’s
economy means leveraging a range of data sources beyond the rewall. As a result, DBAs need to focus on
the value that the data is bringing to their businesses, versus simply running the relational database
environment on a day-to-day basis.

“Data has too long been viewed as something to just be managed by technology or systems—instead we
truly need to make data ubiquitous throughout an organization,” said Katie Fabiszak, chief marketing o cer of
Riversand, a provider of master data management and product information management solutions. “For the
past decade we have been talking about data being a strategic asset but we haven’t really arrived there yet.
Making data the responsibility of everyone is the way we can nally deliver on the notion that data is a
strategic asset. In and of itself, data is not all that important or compelling. It’s when we take great data and
make it part of our business processes that allows magic to happen.”

Cloud-based data environments enable DBAs to concentrate on bigger questions, Daheb remarked. “How do I
architect the database? How do I take advantage of things like blockchain? How do I think about digital
interactions or IoT? It becomes much more about what’s possible now. You have this infrastructure to make it
feasible to run everything from engagement to product development to running nancials for the business.”

With the increasing reliance on data-driven capabilities such as AI and analytics, “organizations need to truly
understand how they need to use data to reach their full potential,” Fabiszak added. “For starters, data needs to
be viewed as an organization-wide responsibility. The actual data itself must be shared and leveraged to ful ll
a particular business purpose. Data can absolutely live up to its promise of being a strategic asset only when
companies—and people—stop thinking of it purely as something to manage and instead think of data as
being just as essential to an organization as its people and its revenue.”

MORE GROWTH, FEWER TECHNICAL RESTRAINTS

The need for greater capabilities means heavier emphasis on data, regardless of format or origin. “Modern
applications, such as social media, investment, and fantasy gaming apps need ve or six-nines availability,
along with worldwide accessibility,” said Gaurav Yadav, founding engineer and product manager at Hedvig,
provider of a distributed storage platform. “They are best suited for entire database systems in the cloud.
There are multiple ways to consume databases in the cloud such as virtual machines with databases installed,
database schema as a service, or scalable database as a service solutions. These approaches also provide a
quick way to bring up database infrastructure instead of building one from the ground-up.”

MORE PLATFORM THINKING, LESS STANDALONE ENVIRONMENTS

With cloud, today’s databases are less likely to be solely servicing limited groups of internal users and are
more likely serving wider audiences beyond corporate rewalls. The rise of IoT, for example, means data
coming in from devices and systems anywhere across the globe. This requires the ability to securely acquire,
replicate, and assure the availability of data beyond the relational database management systems within the
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local corporate data center. The DBA’s role is evolving from a sole, specialized database operator to a maestro
capable of coordinating a symphony of data environments.

“Many hybrid data challenges come down to SaaS and PaaS platform abstractions; in traditional database
management and administration, the DBA held the keys to the kingdom of the data environment,” said Kaus
Phaltankar, president and CTO of Caveonix, which provides a risk management platform for the hybrid cloud.
“In the cloud, especially with SaaS and PaaS o erings, these super users’ privileges are sometimes not
present. The cloud environment requires more coding and command-line knowledge, as the game is much
more software-oriented. DBAs can’t be DBAs anymore—they must be data professionals. It’s also important
for DBAs to work with DevOps engineers for data environment deployments in the public cloud, and, in many
instances, on-premises installations as well. Being able to embrace infrastructure-as-code is becoming more
and more important in the ever-changing data center environment.”

MORE RELIANCE ON DBAS AS TRANSFORMATION AGENTS, LESS

AS LEGACY DATABASE OPERATORS
As enterprises seek to compete in this new era, they are leaning heavily on managers and professionals to
help make the move into the cloud realm. This requires DBAs to be knowledgeable about existing systems
and application requirements. Business and application teams are looking to their DBA partners to identify
valuable data and work with the business to guide them on their cloud journeys.

“Legacy applications and monolithic applications based on a single-tier architecture may require signi cant
refactoring before they can be migrated to the cloud,” said Casi Johnson, chief operations o cer and
innovations leader at M3, a provider of accounting and analytics software for hospitality management. “Any
newer applications that can take advantage of the cloud-hosting bene ts—scalability, monitoring—or would
only require a small amount of modi ed code can be considered ideal for cloud migrations.”

This extends to managing the costs and resource requirements involved in such migrations, said Anupam
Singh, general manager of analytics at Cloudera. “Managing cost for operational expenditure of the cloud will
become harder than the savings of capital expenditure on the cloud,” he said. “Data locality and multiple data
stores can lead to performance challenges. A lot of big data bene ts were from taking compute to the data.
But, as S3 [AWS Simple Storage Service] and ADLS [Azure Data Lake Storage] become popular data stores,
the data will have to be moved to compute. Database engines have to be re-designed to work with remote
data.”

DBAs also will play a greater role in selecting and managing outside cloud service providers. “The main
challenge when handling any cloud environment is vendor lock-in,” said Hedvig’s Yadav. “Extreme care needs
to be taken when selecting any cloud provider, because each provider has its own framework to consume
resources which makes it harder for consumers to move from one provider to another. A cost analysis is also
important, as cloud costs can easily get out of control if the hybrid environment is not designed—because
simplicity comes at a cost. A careful budget analysis should be done before deciding on what
applications/data should be kept in cloud vs on-premises.”

MORE LEADERSHIP FROM DBAS, LESS ORGANIZATIONAL CHAOS

The most prevalent mode of cloud deployments seen these days is “accidental hybrid environments where
di erent groups choose di erent cloud platforms based on their own criteria and an enterprise ends up
supporting a diverse set of clouds,” said Ken Rugg, chief product and strategy o cer at EnterpriseDB. “Since
many companies are still in the experimental phases of cloud adoption, this can actually work well since it
gives them experience in many di erent environments to help inform future choices. However, this creates a
new legacy since applications may take advantage of proprietary features of a particular cloud, making it
di cult to move in the future.” DBAs are increasingly being called to step up and provide clarity and guidance
to manage cloud chaos.

DBAs will also assume roles as educators, as the greatest barriers to the adoption of cloud-based data
environments are knowledge and experience. “Adopters need to learn the capabilities of new technologies as
well as how they’ll t into existing DevOps practices, monitoring, and automation,” said Kyle Clubb, analytics
and data science prinicipal at Quisitive, a provider of solutions for digital transformation. “These are behavioral
challenges, not technical ones.” DBAs will be called upon to address these issues easily by supplying their
teams with adequate training and tools.

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DBAs are uniquely positioned to bridge the worlds of data management and business, paving the way to
successfully developing data-driven enterprises.

Ultimately, the movement to the cloud provides DBAs with two-fold opportunities: rst to help guide the
business as it makes the shift to cloud, and, ultimately, allowing them to devote more time to the things that
matter such as building the business and meeting the needs of customers.

“Data won’t be managed by a single person or group of people,” said Riversand’s Fabiszak. “It is woven
throughout an organization and feeds business processes that span the organization. People must become
savvier and understand what data is needed to solve speci c business problems. No longer will we have siloed
data practices and management, but instead we will have shared data disciplines across the entire
organization. Almost like crowdsourced data management—we may change the way a data element is
described or used based on new inputs or information we learn from each other. At the end of the day, this will
result in much more successful e orts to create, consume, and manage data.”

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