World-Class Oracle expert Jonathan Lewis: I'm worried about the future of DBAs (Turing interview)

Some excerpts

Turing Community: If your children are interested in computer science, what specific direction would you ask them to choose?

JL: My children are not interested in computer science at all, not even in science. They majored in art. If I were to give advice to other people, I would not be able to give any concrete advice. I like what I do, and I encourage others to do the work that interests me. If you can make money out of it, try it. I'm not going to tell anyone that you're going to be oracle. I know there are people who are not interested in Oracle, only because they do a good job and do other things that they can't do. The essence of the question just now is to forecast the market: What will the job market look like after 5 years?

If someone wants to decide their future according to the direction of the future job market. Then I'll take a bold guess. I think there will be a small market for Oracle's top experts. after 5 years, most of the common Oracle jobs will be moved to the cloud, with little support for pluggable databases to maintain a small number of databases. And most small businesses can just lease Oracle's cloud database. They do not need to buy their own hardware and software, nor do they need to have their own dbas, as long as they lease a running database for their application. If you want to be an Oracle DBA after 5 years, you're either working for a big company, and they're keeping the data on their own to protect the privacy of the data. Or to work for a large machine, hundreds of databases are running on 500 machines. Most DBAs in a small company will not exist. In addition to Oracle, there are other database technologies that also evolve in this direction.

In fact, the large number of companies that need to maintain large databases is not very large. No matter what your technology is, DBAs don't have a lot. I'm going to retire in 5 years and I'm in a deep breath. I'm glad I'm not a fledgling expert because I'm worried about the fate of a lot of DBAs in 5 years, and they might find it hard to get a job. Unless they really excel, and everyone recognizes his ability.

World-Class Oracle expert Jonathan Lewis: I'm worried about the future of DBAs (Turing interview)

World-Class Oracle expert Jonathan Lewis: I'm worried about the future of DBAs (Turing interview)