DBAs of the future
After a July visit to DataStax, I wrote
The idea that NoSQL does away with DBAs (DataBase Administrators) is common. It also turns out to be wrong. DBAs basically do two things.
- Handle the database design part of application development. In NoSQL environments, this part of the job is indeed largely refactored away. More precisely, it is integrated into the general app developer/architect role.
- Manage production databases. This part of the DBA job is, if anything, a bigger deal in the NoSQL world than in more mature and automated relational environments. It’s likely to be called part of “devops” rather than “DBA”, but by whatever name it’s very much a thing.
That turns out to understate the core point, which is that DBAs still matter in non-RDBMS environments. Specifically, it’s too narrow in two ways.
- First, it’s generally too narrow as to what DBAs do; people with DBA-like skills are also involved in other areas such as “data governance”, “information lifecycle management”, storage, or what I like to call data mustering.
- Second — and more narrowly 🙂 — the first bullet point of the quote is actually incorrect. In fact, the database design part of application development can be done by a specialized person up front in the NoSQL world, just as it commonly is for RDBMS apps.
My wake-up call for that latter bit was a recent MongoDB 3.4 briefing. MongoDB certainly has various efforts in administrative tools, which I won’t recapitulate here. But to my surprise, MongoDB also found a role for something resembling relational database design. The idea is simple: A database administrator defines a view against a MongoDB database, where views:
- Are logical rather than materialized. (At least at this time.)
- Have their permissions and so on set by the DBA.
- Are the sole thing the programmer writes against.
Besides the obvious benefits in development ease and security, MongoDB says that performance can be better as well.* This is of course a new feature, without a lot of adoption at this time. Even so, it seems likely that NoSQL doesn’t obsolete any part of the traditional DBA role.
*I didn’t actually ask what a naive programmer can do to trash performance that views can forestall, but … well, I was once a naive programmer myself. 🙂
Two trends that I think could make DBA’s lives even more interesting and challenging in the future are:
- The integration of quick data management into complex analytic processes. Here by “quick data management” I mean, for example, what you do in connection with a complex Hadoop or Spark (set of) job(s). Leaving the data management to a combination of magic and Python scripts doesn’t seem to respect how central data operations are to analytic tasks.
- The integration of data management and streaming. I should probably write about this point separately, but in any case — it seems that streaming stacks will increasingly look like over-caffeinated DBMS.
Bottom line: Database administration skills will be needed for a long time to come.
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