The Biggest Database Professional Challenges Today

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The Biggest Database Professional Challenges Today

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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July 22, 2024 at 12:00 am

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Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Biggest Database Professional Challenges Today

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call.copse SSCoach Points: 18020 More actions · Answer 1

I can safely say my team's biggest challenges are from internal politics.

a) Trying to poach resource or persuade VPs etc our successful, profitable team that we can work with less people

b) Other parties adding invoicing etc to ride coat-tail, thus infuriating our clients, with whom our team is utterly transparent about what we're doing

c) Charging other non-involved people to our project, again to ride coat-tail.

As someone who grew up with small companies and loved the directness, I find it hard to believe this nonsense is going on.

This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by call.copse.

David.Poole SSC Guru Points: 75967 More actions · Answer 2

I'm nearing the end of my career. I feel that it is the way my top 3 are interlinked that give me headaches.

One of my big 3 is keeping up with the tech changes. There has been an explosion of tech to do what we used to do in SQL Server. SQL Server itself grew to the point where being an expert in all of it was beyond my capabilities. Then there's the diminishing energy levels that come with age. Studying late into the night after a full day of work is challenging to say the least.

My 2nd is the battle with age related cynicism. What we used to achieve with SQL Server, now seems to involve a lot more moving parts and complicated parts at that. Kubernetes, distributed queues, orchestration tools, polyglot DBs. To be brutally honest I don't think the data quantities have gone up that much, if at all (unless you count the bloat that comes with JSON), the data quality has definitely gone down, the speed of delivery doesn't seem any faster, even front to back latency has gone from sub-second to sub-minute.

Dealing with people has always been something I have found challenging. I'm less crap at it now and have both enjoyed and gained a lot from mentoring roles. I find that the push back that comes when insisting on a level of quality is very hard to tolerate. As one senior colleague put it, "I'm all for tolerance of mistakes but do they have to shoot themselves in both feet".

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david.gugg SSCertifiable Points: 6072 More actions · Answer 3

I'm not sure I can come up with three, but my top two are both dealing with other people. First would be Managed Service Providers. Let's take a basic task, add hours of red tape, let some fellow in India do it wrong, and then clean it up for him. It sucks the joy out of any job. Second is dealing with coworkers who don't get stuff done. Excuse after excuse for missing deadlines, crappy code, lack of understanding of basic best practices, they just don't care. Maybe it's because I'm more experienced than I used to be, but I'm finding I often need to put great effort into being patient and kind when dealing with incompetence.

Be still, and know that I am God - Psalm 46:10

Eric M Russell SSC Guru Points: 125551 More actions · Answer 4

Thanks to Azure, big data, DevOps, and compliance auditing, there has been an explosion in the number of tools and topics a DBA must know to build a solution, and the IT landscape is about as stable as the Florida coastline. I'm not complaining, because a decade or more ago, I struggled with boredom - it's just challenging.

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

Chris Wooding SSCarpal Tunnel Points: 4540 More actions · Answer 5

Quibbling about spending a few £k on tools that would make development of a project worth several £m quicker and easier.
Getting rid of permanent staff with years of experience of the business and then hiring consultants to do the work instead.
3rd party vendors who seem to employ a collection of unsupervised small children to do their development.

Rod at work SSC-Dedicated Points: 33963 More actions · Answer 6

Chris Wooding, I really hear you about your #1. WOW, is that a huge challenge!!

Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.

sqlrider SSC Enthusiast Points: 102 More actions · Answer 7

My biggest challenge is probably whether to pivot to Postgres or data engineering in general, in light of the increasing market capture for PG and absorbtion of DBA activities into managed cloud solutions. If I was ten to twenty years older I wouldn't bother, but it's something I need to consider.

https://sqlrider.net - My technical blog

m60freeman SSC-Addicted Points: 438 More actions · Answer 8

C# developers writing TSQL Stored Procedures. I can forgive putting parentheses around IF predicates, but not all the CURSORs and WHILE loops. Also, databases generated from EF object models in Code First development. Who needs normalization? (We do.)