I get asked quite a bit about my thoughts on the impact Cloud computing has on a DBA role. Still in 2019, I get people say oh it’s the death, will you be made redundant? Are you worried? Simply put… No.

Whilst I will admit things have absolutely changed since I started out with a traditional SQL Server 2008 installation (massively different) it is something to embrace, the issue is, if you don’t embrace it and add those strings to your bow. There is a lack of patching/admin  and to a  certain extent you can argue performance tuning and indexing because some may or may not allow the automatic tuning to take place – I tend not to nowadays. If you use PaaS then no more backup and restore optimizations or H/A configuration (you are still in charge of failover groups), however if you opt to use Azure VMs to host SQL Server then literally you will be doing most of the work.

I feel I have become a bit more generic, I used to be obsessed with “internals” of SQL Server but now I get my enjoyment creating pipelines in Azure Data Factory, setting up and creating Data Lakes, Storage accounts, unstructured data, learning how Azure SQL DW requires a totally different mindset to SQL DB and learning more skills in other areas like networking which has a direct impact on Azure SQL DB VNETs / subnets / endpoints and Azure PowerShell to automate things. I have even used my knowledge gathered so far to help build solutions based on Azure Database for MySQL, can you believe that? There is so much more, what about AKS? Azure Kubernetes Service and its interaction with SQL? I have not even mentioned data analysis.

Traditional / on-premises SQL Servers will always exists because there will be certain scenarios and setups that will not allow for a cloud based strategy, so you still need to still know your database admin / dev skills from before too, plenty to learn and remember.

This is a pretty good summary I found on a Microsoft website, I think it’s true. Hopefully you will enjoy the new learning path. I am.