Why Arent DBAs Obsolete?

These analogies are terrible. The invention of the spreadsheet may have greatly increased the sophistication of the financial projections that you can run while sitting at your desk, but it has hardly made accountants and MBAs obsolete. Quite the contrary, actually. Now it takes a friggin' Ph.D. in mathematical physics to understand finance.

The ability to make dimensioned drawings with Visio doesn't make you an engineer. The ability to type stuff into Wordpress doesn't make you a web developer. Excel has powerful statistical functions built in, but using it doesn't make you a statistician. And blist may succeed in putting Microsoft Access and phpMyAdmin to shame, but I find it hard to believe that it will displace DBAs. It is much more likely that this new tool will allow users to get much, much farther into their data-gathering project before their search speed bogs down, they accidentally delete their data, they get bored doing complicated queries by hand, or they discover that people's last names can actually change over time. After which they will hire a DBA.

Which is not to say that I don't look forward to trying out blist, because I'm no big fan of Microsoft Access.