The evolving role of the DBAs

These changes in industry needs have reshaped the role of the DBA as we know it. While the role of DBAs is crucial within any organization, whether it is a technology business or not, its importance has been growing at a speed that is directly correlated to the digital technology adoption rate. They are constantly looking for ways to optimize their database management systems and are the primary strategy designers to counter data spikes and ensure data safety and data availability.

They've been long considered to be key guardians of the vital strategic asset of data. This responsibility is not narrow in scope as it includes many other duties. DBAs must ensure their organizations can meet their data needs, that databases perform at optimal levels and function properly, and that, in case of any issues, they are called upon to recover the data.

Over the past decade, their responsibilities have also been reshaped thanks to new data-producing devices (smartphones and IoT devices, for example) that continue to drive data growth, thus ultimately increasing the number of database instances under management, as well as a wider array of database management systems. More recent developments have even seen DBAs increasingly involved in application development, making them emerging key influencers in the overall data management infrastructure.

In the next few sections, we will look into the most common and pressing challenges that DBMSs are facing today, and for which a DBA should be prepared.

Overwhelming traffic load increase

Ever since the introduction of the iPhone, mobile phones have gained an increasingly important role in our lives, allowing us to do more than place and receive phone calls while on the go. We now shop, order food, book our vacations, do our banking, hunt for jobs, consume entertainment, and connect with our family and friends thanks to the little devices in our pockets. While this interconnectivity gave rise to multiple new industries and business models (think sharing economy and calling an Uber), they all have one thing in common: data. The amount of data we consume and produce has ballooned to levels that were inconceivable just 15 years ago.

With the advent of the internet, it has become the norm for successful websites or business services that support apps to be receiving visits that reach well into the billions every week.

Sales days such as Cyber Monday in North America or 11/11 (also known as Singles Day) in China (the largest shopping festival in the world) are excellent examples of traditional retail enterprises that adapted to the digital world. Now, they must contend with new needs to successfully achieve their business goals. In cases such as these, retailers are looking to drive traffic to their pages or online stores. But what happens if they succeed and their database clusters are put under incredible pressure? The question becomes a technical one, with DBAs and R&D teams wondering if their database cluster will be able to handle the visitors' traffic.

Microservice architecture for frontend services

To deal with a large number of visitors, the monolithic architecture has since been phased out and officially became history. Instead, microservices architecture has become the new favorite.

A microservices architecture integrates an application as an ensemble of weakly related services. In other words, this results in an application being built as a set of independent components running the process as a service, performing a part of the whole system. Lightweight APIs are how these components communicate, with each service allowing for deployment, updates, and scaling according to specific business requirements as they are run independently.

Cloud-native disrupts delivery and stale deployment practices

The advent of the cloud has brought deep and significant changes, including overturning the way to host, deliver, and start up software.

One of the major changes that can be attributed to the advent of the cloud is the conceptual advance it brought by breaking the barrier between hardware and software. All our media, emails, and the digits of our bank accounts are spread across thousands of servers controlled by hundreds of companies. This is even more impressive if we consider that, not even 20 years ago, the internet was in its inception stages, and only used by early adopters or academics that knew how to search a directory or operate an FTP file.

In a sense, the cloud is the natural result of the stars aligning and all the right conditions being met. If we look back, we can see how the success of the cloud was thanks to the wider adoption of broadband internet, the higher penetration rate of smartphones, allowing constant internet connectivity, and all the other innovations that made data centers easier to build and maintain. This is one of the rare instances where enterprise and consumer innovation seem to be advancing at a comparable pace. From a consumer angle, we can already see how physical storage will soon be unnecessary thanks to the internet, while for business needs, we now find offerings that allow us to run computing tasks on third-party servers – even for free.

In the perennial pursuit of flexibility, many enterprises are now moving their technologies to the cloud because of the scalability and affordability it brings. Being flexible can arguably be interpreted as being adaptable, which is exactly what executives would be after to be able to respond to industry or broader market changes. Plus, it opens the door for startups to sell their product and services directly on the cloud. It also allows them to build, manage, and deploy their applications anywhere with freedom and flexibility.

Considering the significant potential opportunities offered by the cloud, some organizations have already started to adopt a cloud-first strategy, which simply means including or moving to a cloud-based solution at the expense of a strategy built around in-house data centers. This new IT trend is going to move the databases to the cloud as a Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS).

Considering the numerous and significant changes and requirements that businesses and services face in their quest for digital transformation, to keep up the pace with their relative industries, we can easily understand the drive behind companies' motivation to change the way they store, query, and manage data from their databases. The following diagram shows how databases are used to store, query, and manage data:

Figure 1.1 – Database challenges flow

As you can see, the databases on the right are marked with a question mark. This represents two things: what are the possibilities, and what are the directions that you can undertake in your role as a database professional to be prepared for them?

In the next section, you will be introduced to the opportunities and future directions that you should be aware of when it comes to databases. Not only can they give you an advantage in your profession, but they can also help you chart your career if you keep them in mind when it's time to make decisions about your professional development.