Ask HN: Is a dedicated DBA a needed role? My philosophy has historically been senior+ backend engineers with database experience should be able to set up a database schema, or devops engineers on the team should have the expertise to set up things like high availability plans, disaster recovery, and slow query observability. DBA = Database Administrator Curious if anyone has any viewpoints on this or if folks have seen success bringing on a full time DBA. |
Also, I’ve worked with some excellent DBA’s that taught me a thing or two about PG query optimization, and scaling a cluster to the needs of the business. While I’ve also dealt with some awful ones that only stood in the way of projects by creating incredibly contrived security roles. Make sure this individual is a true expert whose skills add value far surpassing that of the managed cloud services.
For the folks you worked with in the past that were excellent, were they full time DBAs in terms of their title? Or were they folks that were in other departments (i.e. devops) that also had expertise in good DB design in scaling?
It might also depend on the size of the company the particular need? Evolving a monolith-like DB already in production to a better structured state might be much to ask of an individual.
Everybody in that engineering org worked with big data and could design the data store system for a regular startup easily. However, this individual’s role was to optimize our multi tenant PG cluster design to build some complex CDP functionality on top of it.
I now work for a larger organization and when I run into the individuals that own shared database resources all they do is impose contrived read/write permissions. However it makes some sense since I work with PII in some cases.