A History of the DBA Role

1970s and 1980s - Inception of the Role:
The 1970s and 1980s witnessed some of the technology industry’s most recognizable milestones and world events. The Microsoft Corp. was founded in 1975, Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak created the first Apple computer in 1976, and Sally Ride became the first female astronaut in space in 1983. This was also the era of the DBA role.

The 1970s and 1980s represented a far simpler time for the DBA. The internet and cloud computing didn’t exist yet. DBAs typically focused on one type of database and it probably ran on the mainframe! Data storage devices typically came in the form of paper tape and punched cards. These now-archaic data storage methods were superseded by direct access storage devices, or DASD. The most common and recognizable DASD option of the 1980s was the refrigerator-sized 3380 disks variety, which contained only 1.2GB of storage at the astronomical cost of more than $200,000. As a reference point, you can buy a 1TB hard drive for just $50 today.

The primary responsibilities of DBAs in this era were pretty similar to those of today: performance and availability of the database, since database performance and availability largely determines the application’s performance and availability, which is what application users will notice. In this era, DBAs had to be much more cognizant of the hardware, storage, and servers that were running the databases they managed.

1990s - DBA Proliferation:
The early 1990s saw the evolution of off-the-shelf applications and, consequently, the rise of the database’s importance. The commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) application evolution, for example, was directly linked to relational databases such as IBM DB2, and Oracle UNIX that roamed the corporate IT landscape.

At the mid-decade mark, Microsoft SQL Server was launched as the relational database engine on Windows, which added even more diversity to the relational database world primarily dominated by Oracle, IBM, and Sybase. With the emergence of SQL Server, the responsibility of the DBA grew, as did the number of solutions and tools available to help manage day-to-day database operations. As DBAs began to leverage these tools, they happily realized a task that would normally take an entire day’s work could now be completed in a mere few hours.

Then came the rise of the World Wide Web in the late 1990s, which brought with it a focus on web and app servers capable of managing multiple clients from the internet that communicated with back-end databases. The internet era demanded a new type of DBA capable of corralling dozens of databases and applications, and the days of the single-database DBA were officially over.

2000s - A New Type of Database:
The turn of the century saw the maturation and scale of SQL Server on Windows, along with an explosion of the open source operating system, Linux. In fact, Linux became so widely deployed that Oracle, Sybase, and DB2 all quickly moved to support it, forcing DBAs to learn yet another operating system.

The mid-2000s then saw the emergence of another member of the database family: the non-relational database. To overcome the limitations of relational databases in dealing with unstructured data, the emergence of non-relational, or NoSQL, database vendors spread like wildfire in the mid-2000s.

While non-relational databases looked to be a great option for big data demands, it also brought with it a new set of challenges for the DBA. A company could have dozens or potentially hundreds of databases that a DBA was responsible for managing at any given time. Each of these databases, Oracle, MySQL, DB2, SQL Server, for example, could be running on different operating systems, adding even more complexity. To keep up with this, DBAs were forced to sharpen their skill sets to not only be well-versed in a variety of database “languages” but also in the wide variety of software tools available to help monitor, manage, and keep this heterogeneous database environment up and running.

DBAs have always adapted to their ever-changing environments. Adaptability and resourcefulness are both qualities required for the job that set apart the good from the great.