I’m a career DBA with no cloud experience. Should I retire early?

No! The fun is just beginning.

Every few years we see huge disruptions in the IT industry (remember there was a time before the internet), and yet again we’re going through another massive change with the rapid adoption of cloud computing. As a 25+ year veteran of Oracle technology and fan of the Oracle Database I wondered what new skills are needed and how quickly can I get up to speed. As someone interested in critical details rather than high level messaging I hesitate to spend time in this blog to tout the benefits of cloud computing. There is a lot of information already out there that is easy enough to find. I will say this however, while leading a small team of engineers for the past 10+ years we spent much of our time doing nothing but installing and configuring, and integrating software for demo and POC platforms, and less time building out actual content. This is just not an efficient use of our time. Today it’s all about content development and scaling deployments.

So what’s different?

In some ways, nothing. All your scripts, applications, databases, data…almost everything you have today will run just fine (even better) in the cloud. If you pride yourself on deep database expertise and solving big data management problems quickly, you can still be a star in the cloud. Expert database design is still a very relevant skill set moving forward, even where database technology advances help mitigate poor design.

But of course not everything is the same. Cloud Databases are in data centers that are accessible from the internet (exception: Cloud at Customer) and have a higher level of security. Passwords are disabled and access requires ssh keys. Databases are encrypted with Transparent Data Encryption by default, and ssh tunnels are used to encrypt data communications. Still, you do get root access and once you’re in it’s all very familiar.

How can I get started?

Most people learn best by doing rather than observing, and running through hands on workshops are a great way to fast track the learning process. They are very instructive on the details, and leave you with skills that accomplish many of the important things you need to know to immediately be productive. In half a day you can navigate the cloud console, spin up databases, migrate databases (a variety of ways), perform common DBA tasks, and even use scripting to manage services. All this can be done with a trial account (free).

Start your free trial and guided tutorial today!

Start with our DBCS for DBAs workshop on Oracle Compute Infrastructure (OCI). You can request a trial account and walk through the workshop, or if you prefer view recorded sessions that walk through each of the hands on labs. This workshop supports DB R12.2 and 18c.