Your Future as a DBA? Secure.
Bright even. But perhaps not for the reasons you anticipate! I’ve been talking with more and more DBAs about the fact that the architecture and performance side of things is becoming increasingly important. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not because of current applications support, but rather design of applications to support mobile devices and cloud-based solutions.
I love this, I have to say. It’s so cool because all of the performance, tuning and design things we’ve all learned for years are coming almost full-circle. If you consider that the biggest challenge to a cloud-based solution is perhaps throughput, and then combine that with the fact that mobile apps have the same issues… you’re starting to see why. The cloud is great for processing. Great for storage. Not so hot for bandwidth. We can add incredible leverage by providing help to the development/deployment/optimization process to have strong data transfer, optimized queries and such.
Think about it a bit – assuming you’re up on indexing, performance tuning your schema designs, understanding normalization and all that good stuff – these are incredibly applicable to the mobile and cloud worlds, exactly where your help is needed to make these applications a success.
How cool is that?
I can see resume changes now… "Experience optimizing data-oriented applications for performance in cloud and mobile environments…" and you’d be exactly right.
What do you think? Let me know…
By the way, sorry for the bad link to the editorial yesterday talking about the cloud and thoughts on where it needs to be stepping up. Here’s a correct link to that article.