August 14, 2011 at 3:46 am
The reason I’m asking is because I’m a System Administrator and thinking about the next step in my career. I’ve always taken to database design and think database administration could be step up in my career in terms of earning more money, opportunities and personal gratification.
However, I have concerns regarding investing my time in a skill that will be in decline and I’m wanting experts in the area to let me know their opinions of the future.
Thanks.
August 14, 2011 at 5:05 am
No one knows for sure. The thing is, everything is not going to move out of all companies, but the trend is towards more & more stuff in the cloud. As a system admin, if your primary job is setting up servers, configuring & installing updates & patches, I'd be worried. As a DBA, if your main work is backups and system configs, I'd be worried too. If you're involved with the business side of things, helping with database design, doing performance tuning, I don't think those jobs are going to shrink in significance. I suspect they'll grow. After all, Microsoft charges for getting data out of the database, so the more efficient queries will cost less. Microsoft also caps performance and will kill connections that exceed thresholds, so again, tuning becomes a must-have skill.
The only thing for sure is that the landscape is changing. I've been doing my best to spend a little time on the cloud every couple of weeks. You can track my progress at my two blogs, Scary DBA[/url] and Scarlet & Scary. I'm trying to figure out the answer to this question as well.
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August 14, 2011 at 8:56 am
One thing that puzzles me about Azure is that fundamentally, under the hood, it is SQL Server. The traditional bits that are not exposed to cloud subscribers still have to be looked after by someone.
If we all migrate to the clouds and no-longer have to worry about clustering, backups etc then somewhere deep in the bowels of some data centre is going to be a small bunch of white faced geeks desparately sweating over a strangely configured geocluster.
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