Cloud Computing and DBA career

Recently, in reply to a question in the MITBBS database forum( in Chinese) –“Will the DBA career become down-hill and the future dimmed with the growth of Cloud Computing and NoSQL movement ?”, I made the following comments:


My understanding till today: NOSQL is just a special purpose database (or data model), it cannot replace traditional general purpose RDBMS. (The market of NoSQL is small). It has little impact on DBA’s career.


Cloud computing provides more choices for a company for its IT infrastructure. Basically three choices: traditional in-house IT； outsource IT totally ( i.e. to public cloud provider, pay-per-use ); consolidating in house IT infrastructure on private cloud; or maybe the fourth choice, some kind of mixing of all above. I think the demanding for DBA role (or system admin, network, storage admin in this regard) will be reduced when a company move part (or all) of its IT to cloud (either public or private).


Demanding for traditional DBA role is not only being affected by emerging of cloud computing. It has been affected by more and more self-managing and automation of RDBMS anyway ( In USA that role is being outsourced to India and China etc)


Obviously if there is a trend to move to cloud with significance, there will be a demanding for “cloud system/support administrator” It should not so difficult for a true DBA ( means he is always willing to learn new things) to transition his role to a cloud administrator.


After making the comments, I googled more and found the following article interesting: “The tech jobs that the cloud will eliminate” ( http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/tech-jobs-cloud-will-eliminate-008 ). There is also a two-part article describing Cloud IT roles here: http://open.eucalyptus.com/learn/cloud-it-roles. It indicated a DBA’s skill-set is extendable to assume Cloud Data Architect role.

I wrote a Perl script to non-interactively search dice.com to get the count of job listing with respect to some keywords. I scheduled to do this count every day. Hope this will give me some kind of insights into the trend about the DBA job market and the impact by Cloud Computing.

For example, the output of the script of yesterday looked like:

2011-11-06 07:59 System+Administrator 5688
2011-11-06 07:59 DBA 2799
2011-11-06 07:59 Oracle+DBA 1570
2011-11-06 07:59 Cloud+Administrator 277
2011-11-06 07:59 Cloud+DBA 74