Ask HN: What is the future for Oracle DBAs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the future for Oracle DBAs?

11 pointsrkrishnaan6 comments

I am asking for a friend who is an Oracle DBA with 10+ years of experience. These days she is seeing the number of opportunities dwindling and the hourly rates going down (thank you AWS, Azure, GCP...). So how can she transition her career going forward ? Does taking a break and doing a 6 month diploma in Data Science course and transitioning into Data Science career help? Should note that she loves her job as a DBA but just worried that it is not going to work out in the long term. Please advise.

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I'm in a similar situation as essentially an Oracle Developer with 20+ years experience. I have gradually worked with more db engines (Sql Server, Postgres, MySQL, Redis, Sqlite, Mongo, Couchbase, Snowflake) along with Oracle on projects I've been on. I've also explored more webservice development with java and .net core and mobile dev. I've investigated and used quite a few BI stacks too. I've worked with AWS and Azure.

All this has been related with my work to Oracle and it's helped me gain more of an Architecture type position now so I'd recommend growing your skills within the position they're already in AND if you feel it's necessary do some personal projects in your own time. I don't feel quitting work to study an only slightly related area would necessarily help unless you have a large amount of time/money to spare.

Whoever suggested Oracle will be around for a while is also right, so there will probably always be jobs if you can compete for them. For instance in the UK I'm aware that 100s of banks and most utility companies have used Oracle in core systems. A lot of these systems remain.

Oracle financials... pays more per hour... otherwise specialize in migrations to open source. You will have another 20 years of migrating off overpriced solutions

I am not a DBA but I work with many of them. Most of the DBA's I currently work with have/had Oracle experience, but they are currently supporting MySQL. Some of them also know Postgres. There will always be a need for database engineers and architects. Even knowing how to optimize queries can be quite valuable to a company. Already being an Oracle DBA it should be rather easy for her to pick up the open source databases and widen her career opportunities. IIRC there are even blogs where former Oracle DBA's wrote how-to's that summarize command equivalents for Oracle -> MySQL and Oracle -> Postgres so that if you already know one, you can see the equivalent commands in the corresponding technologies.

As a side note, there are also some git repos that have optimizing scripts for MySQL and Postgres that may also help her learn some of the memory management differences in the other technologies. [1][2] These tools are not perfect, but may be informative.

[1] - https://github.com/jfcoz/postgresqltuner

[2] - https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl

I don't like Oracle and I'm a big proponent of learning new things, but just to play Devil's Advocate:

The Oracle ecosystem is still enormous, with many lucrative enterprise customers that will never ever migrate away. Your friend might consider doubling down on her expertise and simply competing for better-paying Oracle gigs.

That said, I don't think it has to be an either/or. I think people can learn a new tech stack without abandoning an old one.

> thank you AWS, Azure, GCP...

This might be your answer. She can look for ways to transition to being a cloud engineer. There is a lot of complexity there and plenty of work to be done for the foreseeable future. As a DBA she should find that switch easier to make than moving to data science.

I think something like data science could make sense. Learning about cloud databases like Snowflake or BigQuery seems like a decent option with lots of transferable skills/knowledge.

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