i was replying to a comment that said they’d worked with “thousands of dba’s (sic)” who were superfluous, so as a rhetorical device, I used their own phrase to make my own point - that being a dba requires a combination of generalized expertise, and specialized domain knowledge. it’s honestly frustrating how much negative publicity a DBA gets in general because they’re cautious and wary because they have to have an eye to the big picture in addition to delivering the specific objective. I have hundreds of examples where I’ve had to teach security admins how to use wireshark to demonstrate that their security policy settings are incorrect. or how many full stack traces I have to deliver to front and developers to demonstrate that the time out on their asynchronous quick search functions are problematic. or how many heat dumps I’ve had to interpret for java developers to demonstrate that they have a memory leak that’s blowing up the app server, which is making the user experience slow.
the knee-jerk reaction to simply blame the data layer nearly forces the DBA to be a master of all layers of the stack. my experience is that quality issues from javascript and application code developers are proliferating at a much faster rate than the “dba’s”
Sure, but the article was about dba's. I worked with DBAs first in the 80s; very competent grumpy old white men who would not let you near the systems. Until about 2005, we had to sit with a team of them, have the db changes printed out and discuss why we needed that, pros and cons and discuss the (then Java) application in detail. Often good remarks came back, we went back and forth and it got done. There was somewhere there a transition to cloud and dba's no longer really needed or 18 year old college students don't make bad dba's or we can outsource them etc. I remember close to 2010 sitting at a large european publisher who had a dba team that barely knew databases, let alone the rest of the stack.
But yes I agree with your points generally, the rest of the tech staff is often even worse. This article was about dba's and I have and do meet many who shouldn't be ones and who are dangerous. Way too many.
