SQL Server DBA Online Training

Plotting Your Next Move as a DBA

• IT professionals is that the most important thing you can do in your career is to not chase the new, shiny technology.
• It is tempting to dive deep into a new technology like Kubernetes. However, it is equally important to have a grounding in your main focus area before trying to expand into new technologies.
• This means that if you are a system admin, you have complete understanding of the OS platform you support before you try to learn database skills. Similarly, if you are a DBA, you should have a mastery of your RDBMS before you pursue a business intelligence or virtualization path.
• While many pundits are concerned about the impact of the cloud, realistically, there will remain a strong market for DBAs for at least the next decade. (And if you are database developer, think you can safely count on having work for the rest of your lifetime.)
• Having strong DBA skills like data security, data protection and performance tuning will make you marketable for the foreseeable future.
• Nearly all of these skills will translate to the cloud, even if you are using a Database as a Service offering like Azure SQL Database or Amazon RDS.
• Another interesting career point about the cloud is that it makes it easier for IT professionals to quantify the impact of their performance-tuning efforts, since their bosses get an itemized bill of their company's cloud usage costs every month.
• However, it is still important to branch out -- not just to ensure that you are keeping up with technology, but because in most firms, the DBA or system admin role has a ceiling both in terms of salary and status. 
• In order to prepare yourself for higher-level technical roles like architect, you are going to want to advance your skills in other areas.
• Don't have one magic bit of advice for how to do this. To a degree, you need to follow your own technical interests, but I would lean toward learning automation skills, simply because it will increase your technical aptitude and leave you with more free time to work on other skills.
• While you may be happy to be a DBA, to advance your career (and salary), you typically will need to broaden your horizons to either become a consultant or an architect.
• The DBA role sits at the nexus of application and infrastructure support, which means by expanding your skillset down the path of either data management or infrastructure architecture and design, you can be well-suited to move into a data or infrastructure architecture career.
• Let's take a look at what each of those two paths look like.

Infrastructure Architect

• Reducing licensing costs, designing a hardware platform and building standards for the DBA teams. While this role was less technical than being a full-time DBA, it was still quite technical.Had a large programming effort when we built our private cloud, and I built one of the first Hadoop clusters in the company.
• In current times, we would expect this role to support public clouds in terms of standards and design, and manage integration between on-premises and cloud. And yes, we would expect Kubernetes would be a key part of this going forward.
• Building automation across systems platforms is something else we would expect to be part of this role.

Data Management

• Unlike the infrastructure path, moving into a data path tends to be more focused on your specific business area, rather than a general technology area.
• To understand your company's data, you will first need to understand the business problems you are trying to solve with your data.
• This role will also involve classifying data, determining systems of record and potentially even addressing the security of data.
• While this may feel like it may be less technical than an infrastructure role, you will most likely be doing a large amount of data modeling and scripting to wrangle correct data, as well as working directly with business units to address their data needs.
• This role is probably the most future-proof, as no matter what service you company stores its data in, someone needs to be around to manage that data and understand the meaning of the data to the business.
• In terms of future-proofing, this role as secure as any, and will only become more critical as data and artificial intelligence (AI) become more important to all businesses.
• Many of the tasks that DBAsoversee today such as backups/restores, security, configuration, and query tuning will gradually disappear. These are all tasks that can (and are) being automated away.
• In time there will be jobstitled “DBA”. But there will always be a need for data professionals.
• Employment of database administrators(DBAs) is projected to grow 9 percent from 2018 to 2020, faster than the average for all occupations. Growth in this occupation will be driven by the increased data needs of companies in all sectors of the economy.