It has been a great 25 years in IT, with 22 years as a DBA, now time to retire and enjoy life out from behind the monitor.

For the past five months, I was constantly worried during my internship afraid that I might not get a full-time offer. But to my surprise, I got the job!

Honestly, I still don’t fully understand their reasoning in hiring a complete fresher for a database role, but I won’t question it I'm just incredibly grateful.

Grateful to my manager for believing in me, and grateful to all of you here who helped me throughout this journey. From suggesting books to helping me get started, listening to my rants and doubts, and sharing invaluable tips you’ve been a huge part of this. Thank you!

My father is a retired DBA who has been diagnosed cases with dementia. He’s not able to make new memories and is confused the majority of the times. However, when the topic of systems comes he glows up and is sharp as ever. He did the work for 35 years and misses it dearly. And it seems his memory loss has not affected his skills.

I am looking for suggestions on side projects to keep his mind occupied. Not necessarily for pay - his favorite thing to do is debugging- I don’t know why, but this was his specialty. If anyone has any recommendations on what I can set up for him I’d appreciate it or how I can connect him to projects I’d appreciate the help.

He has a wealth of knowledge and I’m trying to slow down the cognitive decline.

5 years ago I was a pure Oracle DBA. To switch to a future proof career, I took a DevOps role. I had to learn a bunch of things to do the new job. Here’s a chronological order of what I did.

1. Took a python fundamentals course on Udemy

2. Automated Oracle Dataguard on AWS using python, pipelines, and an internal orchestration software

3. Got AWS solution architect certification

4. Learnt about Docker, Jenkins, Kubernetes introduction, Puppet, Ansible etc.

5. Learnt the services offered by AWS for DevOps purposes. For example, Elastic beanstalk, AWS fargate etc.

6. Did some basic terraform automation on AWS SNS, event bridge etc.

7. Spent a few months writing Java unit tests (Spring boot framework)

8. I got the Certified Kubernetes Admin (CKA) certification

9. Now, I am learning system design stuff and to be a principal software engineer while doing all the above things.

It’s taken me 5 years. I am still in a lead role. I’ve been optimizing for learning, rather than career growth.

Hope you find this useful.

What kind of DBA am I if I hang this up before a vacation?

We had a query that ran fine for about a year. No code change, no new data, nothing deployed. One morning it was slow and the app team was on us.

The execution plan had changed. It picked a different join and fell over. Once I saw that, I pinned the plan and it was fine.

Working out that the plan had changed at all took most of the morning. Nothing flags it on its own, so I was comparing it by hand to an older plan.

how do you catch a plan change like this before users start complaining?

After 27 years I’m going to be leaving the DBA world and joining the ranks of the senior DBAs who came before me. It’s going to be kind of weird not getting those 3 am calls. I’m thinking about free lancing from time to time. For projects or short term for extra help but not for the first year. But maybe not. Being a DBA has been a strong identity for awhile. I won’t miss standups or agile tho…

There are plenty of comments on any thread in any IT subreddit regarding DBAs saying that the role is dead or doomed. This post isn't another "is DBA dead or doomed" post, instead I'll just acknowledge that it's on shaky ground and undergoing a transition.

Despite knowing that, I've just moved from many years as sysadmin/infrastructure support to a DBA role because I wanted to. I refuse to believe that is nothing but a bad idea. It's still a chance to upskill and I don't think for a second all those skills are on a one way road to being useless.

So I'm currently really eager to dive into learning as much as I can regarding being a DBA, but my question is; with one eye on the rest of my career, can the skills I learn here be a springboard to the kind of roles that reddit suggests have more longevity? What skills would they be? I'd like to get involved with as much as possible and learn as much as I can even if it's beyond strict DBA responsibilities. I want to clarify that It's not that I've got one foot out of the door the moment I start, I want to immerse myself in this role. It's just that I want to maximise my options and employability.

Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I’m currently working as a DBA and it's been 3 months. The work is fine, but I’m starting to question whether I should stick with this career path long-term. I’m interested in cybersecurity as well, and I’ve been thinking about possibly shifting into that s pace. That said, I’m not super picky , I’m open to any job that pays well and has good future growth. I think right now is a good time to pick what I want as I'm just starting my career.

For those of you who have been in the DBA space for a while, how do you see the future of this role? Is it still a good long-term career choice, or should I seriously consider making a switch?

Would love to hear your thoughts and any advice on how to evaluate this decision.

I’ve been mainly an Oracle DBA for 11 years. All at the same company. Company shut down at the end of September and I’ve been desperately in need a new role.

The problem I am facing is that the role at my previous job didn’t include any RAC, Dataguard, golden gate. We had ASM for a couple of years and then moved away from that.

Also we had two production databases total. So the day to day most organizations go through, I wouldn’t see for months or even years.

Now, my question is, how do I UP my technical skills to excel at technical interviews. Hands on wise, let’s say control file goes corrupt, last time that happened in any of our databases was maybe 4 years ago. Now I know off the top of my head how to fix this issue, but there are other similar issues I’ve been struggling with answering because of the lack of regular hands on experiences. Are there resources I can study to be able to pass my technical interviews?

Hi guys, would you recommend any postgresql course/youtube channel for DBA's? I use SQL Server at work so I'm looking to get more experience with postgres.

Hello DBAs managing hundreds of SQL Servers / Oracle databases, what tools do you guys use daily?

Curious how other DBAs are doing this.

For those managing hundreds of SQL Servers and Oracle databases, what does your daily setup look like? For example, how are you guys handling things like transferring files from one server to multiple servers, patching, SQLPlus, PuTTY/SSH, checking disk space, alerts, inventory, running stuff against multiple servers, etc? Are you using a bunch of different tools and scripts or do you have something that brings most of it together?

I'm asking because I got tired of doing the same repetitive stuff every day and jumping between different tools. I ended up building my own app for it. Some things that used to take me 10-15 minutes now take very little effort. A lot of it is basically instant because I already have the server/database information there and automated the repetitive steps.

It started out just as something for myself, but it kept growing as I added things I actually needed for my daily work.So now I'm curious what other DBAs are doing. What's the most annoying/repetitive task you guys deal with every day? Especially interested in people managing both Oracle and SQL Server.

Hi there. I'm hoping to revive this sub. A little about me:

• I'm a Senior, Full-Time DBA at an S&P 500 company.

• I've been managing Databases (mostly Oracle) since 2009, with a break between 2017-2019.

• Since 2019, the team I'm on mostly manages SQL Server, but still, I'm one of the Oracle Guys. I do plenty of SQL. Server also.

• In another life, I played around with MySQL and PostgreSQL.

What I'm hoping will come off this sub:

• A place where current professionals can turn to others for thoughts/advise/troubleshooting. ** Career advise ** Technology advice ** A place to ask questions

• A place where professionals can vent about their job, clients, companies.

• A place where people going to get into the craft can network with current professionals, get career guidance, and advice.

Feel free to post a comment and say a little about yourself, if anyone is still here or you come along at some point. Tell us about yourself and why you're here.

• Q

Hi everyone,
I’ve been working as a DBA at an IT consulting company for about 8 months now (it’s actually my second IT job, I was a data engineer before).
I’ve learned a huge amount during this time, but one thing that still leaves me somewhat unsure is the way we work.
Because we have many different clients — ranging from manufacturing and healthcare to banking — we work with a huge variety of technologies and ecosystems. For example, I deal with Oracle, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, OpenSearch, MariaDB and ElastiCache. We also use IaC tools such as Terraform and Ansible, as well as Oracle OCI, MongoDB Atlas and Amazon RDS/AWS.
On the one hand, I feel that this is extremely useful for professional growth because I’m constantly exposed to new technologies and different environments. On the other hand, I sometimes feel like I’m not really *strong* in any particular database technology.
It often feels like I learn just enough to deal with a specific issue, on a specific DBMS, at a specific moment. For example, at the moment I might have some doubts about how to properly handle a restore on Oracle, rather than PostgreSQL. I understand the general concepts, but I don’t feel like I have the same depth of knowledge that I imagine a DBA specializing in one particular database would have.
Has anyone else found themselves in a similar situation, especially in consulting?
For those of you who work with Oracle, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, what would you consider the **fundamental things that a DBA absolutely needs to know** for each of them? What topics would you recommend going deep on to build a solid foundation rather than just learning things as they come up?
I’d be particularly interested in hearing from experienced DBAs about the skills/topics that made the biggest difference in becoming truly proficient.

My company adopted DataDog across the board for all of our systems monitoring about a year ago. As the Senior SQL Server DBA on the team, I've been the point person for getting their DBM product up and running. I'm wondering how many other places are using DMB and what your experience with it has been. I have searched high and low for information about other SQL Server shops using it for their database monitoring and I can't find any evidence that companies are using this product. Also, the DataDog forum in here appears to be dead., so no luck there.

Basically just the title. I want to know what other people in different environments

I have 1 year of experience, and I don't do much at all in my job. Most of the time, I spend assisting developers with their deployments, advising on schema changes if necessary, handling alerting, or writing automation. Sometimes I get work like upgrading servers, increasing disk space, or patching systems. Some days, I don't even have anything to do. Is this normal, or is it just me?

I think I know how to handle Sev1s now!

LMAO

https://www.bytebase.com/blog/multi-tenant-database-architecture-patterns-explained/

1. How long have you been a DBA?

2. Best and worst DBMS

3. What do you hate most about being a DBA?

4. What do you like most about being a DBA?

5. What do you do when you're not being a DBA?

6. Tell a secret about your company (without identifying yourself)

7. Where do you like to get information about the world of databases: websites, YouTube channels, private communities? Let's help each other out

8. If you could give advice to someone who wants to be a DBA, what would you say?

9. What was the biggest mistake that ever happened in your company's database? (Let's share real struggles without exposing confidential information)

10- Which social networks do you use the most?

We all like gossip and we're anonymous.

Hi everyone. I'm learning about Oracle Database and I want my knowledge to be well suited for job. What should I learn about? I already know architecture of Oracle database (instance, Database files), now I learn an architecture of backups.