A good friend of mine is a REALLY good COBOL programmer. I didn’t say was. I said is. And he makes really good money programming in COBOL wellbecause there isn’t a lot of competition. His company has a huge investment in systems written in COBOL. So, they keep rolling along because it gets the job done, and it doesn’t make sense financially to convert away from COBOL.
As I have been watching the industry change over that last few years as it relates to SQL database engines, I’m wondering if the same decline is not emerging for the DBA. Much of the logic we would have put into stored procedures is being placed in another application tier. Our databases are becoming relational repositories often utilized in basic CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) operations from an ORM (object relational mapper) code generator. The power of SQL is declining in value.
Is the DBA guru of all things SQL going the way of the COBOL programmer? It is probably too early to tell. Right now there is a pretty large fad where companies are trying on NoSql engines. As they continue to do that they are probably finding that NoSql may solve many problems, there is still a place for the relational engine as well.
Take a look at Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter and others who have pioneered NoSql engines in order to handle the scale of their applications. Even so, they still have relational data stores in their companies.
How is the DBA role playing out for you? Are you finding challenges and new opportunities to use new capabilities of the engines? Are you thinking you need to diversify in order to keep gainfully employed? Are you learning NoSql engines in order to understand where they fit in the data persistence needs of your company?
Share your experience here. Get into the conversation by adding your comments or drop an email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben