I ran across a piece on the fall of the DBA (or part of a piece), and wondered if this is the time when the DBA is disappearing. I do know that plenty of organizations never formally adopted the DBA as a position, and plenty more have abandoned it. Not that there aren't people managing databases, but they have moved into Database Engineer, SRE, or plain old sysadmin. They might even have another job but function as an accidental DBA.

The DBA role has often been a mix of many things. Certainly, this is a tactical, operations role that keeps systems running, dealing with performance, security, and availability. DBAs also fix quality issues in production, deploy code changes, and often advise developers on what works well and what doesn't. They tend to be a bit of insurance against things going wrong as well as the scapegoat when anything does go wrong. I found the DBA role to be a constantly changing, never-ending grab-bag of challenges on a regular basis.

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