What does it mean when blist says that we want to democratize working with data, breaking our dependence on DBAs? Do I think the DBA profession is going away? No, not entirely, but their numbers will be fewer and their challenges will be greater. Complex systems will still require a DBA – either to model a 75 or 100 table schema or to keep a large database running. The democratization we’re talking about is empowering mainstream people to organize data models comprised of 1, 2 or 3 tables.
For example, an applicant tracking system can be simplified to two primary tables – applicants (people) and interview results. The two fundamental entities in a recipe blist are recipes and ingredients. Why shouldn’t a mainstream person be able to design data structure for these? Of course, they should.
One parallel way to think about this is to think about the demise of professional sportswriters. Decades ago we relied on sportswriters to tell us the basic facts – the outcomes of the games. As a youth I was a voracious consumer of baseball box scores in the newspaper. The next morning was the earliest I could get the details of the prior days games. Obviously today access to the outcomes and details of games is pervasive and ubiquitous. There are sites that have realtime boxscores – I can “watch” a game play by play if I want to. There are hundreds of bloggers who “live blog” key plays throughout the duration of games. One casualty of the ubiquitousness of this information is the ordinary sportswriter. We no longer rely on sportswriters to inform us of the basics. Sports writing has been democratized. Are sportswriters extinct? No, but their numbers are fewer and the ones who are able to survive do so by offering much more than the facts. Frank Deford thrives as a sportswriter because he analyzes, evokes, provokes and entertains. There will always be a need for the Frank Defords because very few of us can as eloquently tell a yarn around the subject of sports.
DBAs will still be needed for those things mere mortals can’t do with a database. But for your average, ordinary tasks involved with organizing data, I’m convinced we’ll all do that for ourselves.
This is a good analogy. Great post.
The same thing happened to management accountants when computers took over the number-crunching. Management accountants still thrive where they can “add value” in terms of analysis and presenting the data in useful ways.
You’re right, DBAs will survive. They will design and tweak complex, efficient data schemas in enterprise databases. They might also find themselves using Blist!