In the age of data, artificial intelligence, cloud sprawl and escalating compliance demands, the humble database administrator (DBA) is no longer just a ‘guardian of databases’.
For chief data officers (CDOs) and data leaders aiming to monetise data, plus practitioners tasked with delivering operational excellence, the DBA has evolved into a strategic partner and critical enabler of governance, performance and cost optimisation.
For business leaders, modern DBAs aren’t just keeping databases alive, they are reducing the cloud bill, safeguarding compliance and enabling faster insights for revenue growth. They need to be treated as strategic partners, not backroom operators.
Historically, the DBA role centred on provisioning and configuring databases, monitoring and performance tuning, managing storage and backups, ensuring high availability, disaster recovery and responding to incidents and slowdowns. This work, while essential, is just the ‘keeping the lights on’ component of the job.
This is a high-pressure, high-reward career. In large enterprises – banks, for example − one might have a team of 10 DBAs tasked with managing up to 1 000 instances of SQL servers across a range of divisions. As a standard, 40 to 60 instances per DBA can be expected; however, in the industry today, high-performing individuals can be seen pushing the boundaries and achieving the unthinkable.
This comes with its own caveats, such as overtime − an acceptable price to pay for continuity and stabilisation in business-critical environments.
Today, DBAs must also be proactive strategic business enablers. They must support security and compliance and prevent substantial fines to be incurred from audit findings in terms of licensing.
With the myriad skills a modern DBA requires, they are in high demand and increasingly head-hunted.
Cloud optimisation tasks that ready environments for the move to cloud are crucial in terms of curbing usage costs. This can increase utilisation expenditure from 30% to 50% more than procurement of on-premises infrastructure for the same workload.
Analysis of compute and storage, migration costs, licences, CAPEX vs OPEX, to name just a few elements, must be carefully considered by the data partner to maximise business benefit.
Modern DBAs are critical data custodians: they manage data and access to it, as well as how data performs for the business. They must ensure the data is readily available, accessible, current and recoverable.
They are the operational guardians that ensure the data is accurate so the business can make the most informed decisions in the fastest possible time. As they are the ones with the highest-level access to sensitive and mission-critical data, they have a great deal of responsibility.
To deliver on evolving KPIs, DBAs must approach performance optimisation as a continuous service improvement process. Performance tuning should not be a once-off task but rather part of continuous integration and development pipelines and observability tools.
Modern DBAs need to be considered more as strategic enablers who must understand application behaviour, query patterns and usage trends, architecture fit for purpose — not just server load.
DBAs in the cloud
Gone are the days of overprovisioning hardware ‘just in case’. Cloud models now demand cost-aware resource allocation. DBAs are expected to optimise compute, memory and storage — balancing cost versus performance.
One of the challenges is that businesses don't readily think about their data growth paths − how much the data is growing, how fast it's growing and how this data should be managed in future. In the cloud, if data volumes keep growing faster, the company is going to pay more for storage.
The DBA needs to create data governance and management policies to ensure the business can readily and quickly access required data. Such data needs to be kept in a fast computing environment, and everything else moved to lower storage tiers to save on costs.
While cloud platforms have automated many traditional DBA tasks, DBAs also remain crucial for strategic initiatives, such as data modelling and cross-environment consistency.
DBAs and security
Modern DBAs play a key role in enterprise security and resilience. As businesses embrace AI, they are giving elevated data access to more people in the organisation, often unnecessary but convenient. The DBA plays a key role in ensuring sensitive information is protected and access is controlled.
With strict regulations − including GDPR, POPIA and HIPAA − the DBA must now wear a data governance hat which ensures data lineage, security, audit trails and role-based access. They are critical players in regulatory compliance and data privacy.
The modern DBA must think in terms of prevent, tune, optimise. This means they must prevent issues before they occur, and tune the system dynamically through automation and workload-aware configurations. This is followed by optimising for scale, governance and performance, across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Despite all the additional responsibilities that make the DBA a strategic data enabler, their evolved role does not replace that of a CDO.
DBAs not only have to comprehend what the data is, they must be cognitive of data flows and understand stakeholders and how they can change the queries that are run to optimise performance. They are practical, hands-on, enablers for the CDO.
In the future, where the chief technology officer manages the technologies that go into the environment, and how they are used on a strategic level, the DBA will serve as the bridge between everyone.
DBAs now work alongside developers, site reliability engineers and data engineers, whether they are integrating database change management in DevOps workflows or collaborating on real-time data solutions.
With the myriad skills a modern DBA requires, they are in high demand and increasingly head-hunted. Having a team of DBAs remediates the risk of continuity challenges, offers stability, availability and resourcefulness.
Companies recognising the importance of the DBA should consider partnering either directly with said professionals, or with providers capable of delivering DBAs as a service. This model is worthy of consideration as it provides businesses with continuity, expertise and teams of dedicated professionals to deliver on modern DBA key performance indicators.
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