Karen Jex

Do you ever find yourself pondering life’s important questions: What does a DBA actually do? How has the role changed over the years? What will it look like in the future? Why are DBAs so grumpy?

It shocked me to realise recently that it’s almost a quarter of a century since I started work as a junior database administrator, fresh out of university. Just like everything else in the IT world, the role of the DBA has evolved massively in that time. Has it changed beyond recognition, or does today’s DBA still do fundamentally the same job?

I don’t imagine most DBAs currently spend their time reorganising their datafiles to create contiguous blocks of free space that the database can make use of. And I’m fairly certain the world is a better place for it.

My 21 year-old self could never have imagined managing a self-healing, automated, scalable database cluster on Kubernetes.

On the other hand, the questions of data modelling, disk capacity, query performance, and user management are as relevant today as they were back then.

Let’s take a light-hearted look at the changing role of the DBA over the past couple of decades, with some guesses about what the DBA of the future will be doing. Or will autonomous databases finally have put us all out of work?

Most organizations or database teams don't have the luxury of looking after just a single database application. Some will manage at least a few applications, others will have hundreds. In most organizations, the question of multi-tenancy will therefore probably arise. The Postgres environment can be designed in various different ways to accommodate multiple customers and/or applications. For example: - each application could have its own Postgres cluster - we could create a separate database per application within a shared cluster - we could create a single database that contains a separate schema per application - we may allow multiple customers to share a single schema, with the (shared) tables partitioned by customer But which of these is the “right” option? The answer is, as always, “it depends”. The correct method is the one that provides the required balance between performance, security, high availability and manageability. In this presentation, we'll look at the different multi-tenant architectures and the advantages and disadvantages of each. It should enable you to design the most appropriate database environment for your applications.