The Changing Role of the DBA
Another trend becoming the responsibility of the DBA is that of the Data Access Layer (DAL) in multi-tier software. I believe this may be due to the fact that the DBA is the most intimately in tune with the relational data structures, and may be best qualified to modify those structures, and make them available in the DAL.
I’m seeing more and more DBAs responsible for tools such as Entity Framework, Linq2SQL, nHibernate, Hibernate, NetTiers amongst dozens of other ORM generation tools. Many of these tools also auto generate the DAL code as well as map data objects to the business objects.
Even using an auto-generated DAL, there are times when custom database code is the best choice. At this point, the DBA is responsible to create and integrate the custom code with the auto-generated DAL software. I found this combination to be very rewarding. The mundane Create/Retrieve/Update/Delete (CRUD) stuff could be handled by the code generator, leaving the DBA with more time to optimize database access where most needed.
With the elevation of the DBA into other tiers I find more becoming proficient with other skill such as unit testing. This isn’t to say that unit testing techniques couldn’t be used by a purse DBA working only in SQL languages. We always did some form of unit testing. The change seems to be DBAs are using automated testing tools more and more, integrating database tests into those of the rest of the code base.
Tomorrow we’ll wrap up this discussion with the topic of Database Refactoring. If you have other things you’d like to add to the conversation, drop me a note at btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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