Death of the DBA (Again)

Every few years, something comes along that's definitively, no-questions-asked going to replace us.

Let's review the historical record.

A Brief History of DBA Extinction Events

1996: Larry Ellison announces Oracle 8i and "lauds its self-managing capabilities as being the death of the DBA."
— Claremont

2017: Larry Ellison unveils Oracle Autonomous Database: "a totally automated 'self-driving' system that does not require human beings to manage or tune the database."
— Claremont

2020: A DBA reports from job interviews: "The interviewer in both cases said 'we don't have a DBA, our databases are in the cloud and an upgrade is as easy as pushing a button and requires no downtime.'"
— SolarWinds

2022: Matthieu Cornillon, Database Tech Leader at ADEO: "The DBA is dead... The job we knew is dead, and there's no doubt about it. Automation and the cloud made sure of it."
— Medium

2023: Larry Ellison doubles down: "The Oracle Autonomous Database is self-driving because it has an AI module that is the DBA. We replaced the DBAs with AI."
— Cloud Wars

And yet. Here we are. Still employed. Still getting paged at 2 AM. Still explaining to developers why SELECT * in production is a bad idea.

What Actually Happened

Every one of those technologies became part of the toolkit. GUIs made administration faster. Cloud made provisioning easier. NoSQL found its niche. Serverless handles specific workloads beautifully.

None of them eliminated the need for someone who actually understands what's happening under the hood.

AI will be the same.

The Job Description Is Changing (Again)

Here's what I've noticed in the past year:

The DBAs who treat Copilot like a threat are spending their energy on resistance. The DBAs who treat it like a junior team member are getting more done.

Think about it. A junior DBA who:

• Responds instantly
• Doesn't complain
• Knows every syntax variation you've forgotten
• Still needs supervision on the big stuff
• Will confidently give you wrong answers if you don't check the work

Sound familiar? That's every junior DBA you've ever trained. The only difference is this one doesn't take days off.

The Skills That Matter More Now

Judgment. Knowing which solution fits the actual problem. Copilot can generate five different approaches; you have to know which one won't crater production.

Context. Understanding the business, the workload patterns, the history of why things are the way they are. AI can't attend your architecture meetings.

Accountability. When the query Copilot suggested locks up the database, someone has to fix it -- and it won't be the chatbot.

Communication. Translating between business requirements and technical implementation. Being the one who explains why those warnings shouldn't wait until they become outages.

These are the skills that were always valuable. They're just more visible now that the routine work is being automated.

The Good & the Bad

AI won't replace good DBAs.

But I'm betting it will expose those who were mostly doing work that AI can now do faster.

If your value proposition was 'I know the syntax and I can write basic queries', you have a problem. That was never enough — it's just more obvious now.

If your value proposition is 'I understand the systems, I make good decisions under pressure, and I can solve problems that don't have Stack Overflow answers', you're fine. Better than fine, actually. You now have a tireless assistant for the boring parts.

My Prediction

Five years from now, we'll look back at the AI panic of 2025 the same way we now look back at the cloud panic of 2010.

Some jobs changed. Some people adapted. The ones who leaned in came out ahead.

The robots aren't taking our jobs. They're just making it more clear what our jobs actually are.