I would agree that in some organization sizes it is fading out & becoming hidden by ever increasing raw compute/disk performance which inevitably hides many bad queries.
However for some orgs this becomes a brick wall they eventually smash into.
The cloud vendors now provide moderately ok database offerings on a variety of virtual hardware that allows you hide a lot sub optimal data modelling, index usage and inefficient data modelling.
Any database workload is performant while all the data fits in ram.
I agree with some other comments that there is a bit of a shift left approach to the DBA role now. I find that dedicated DBA skill sets are somewhat useful up until a point then they struggle to have context of the application stack beyond.
If you want a solid DBA career you may want to look at a SRE track/pathway that includes some deep focus on databases.
You will want to know the how various index types work, when and why to use them.
Data types.
Intricacies of various database mechanics that impact performance and scaling workloads.
Solid foundations in highly available system design, maintenance and operation.
A willingness to be on-call.
A willingness to write code to a software engineer level or send in changes to the dev team/s to help optimise queries, drivers, connection pool settings/timeouts or ORM usage (shudder).
I think the days of a pure DBA role are coming to a close in technology lead organisations. Maybe not in banking/insurance or other orgs where DBAs found a home to sit in the back office doing minute query tuning on a reporting query etc.
If more developers have read and understood the content in https://use-the-index-luke.com/ then there would be less need for DBAs.
However for some orgs this becomes a brick wall they eventually smash into.
The cloud vendors now provide moderately ok database offerings on a variety of virtual hardware that allows you hide a lot sub optimal data modelling, index usage and inefficient data modelling.
Any database workload is performant while all the data fits in ram.
I agree with some other comments that there is a bit of a shift left approach to the DBA role now. I find that dedicated DBA skill sets are somewhat useful up until a point then they struggle to have context of the application stack beyond.
If you want a solid DBA career you may want to look at a SRE track/pathway that includes some deep focus on databases.
You will want to know the how various index types work, when and why to use them. Data types. Intricacies of various database mechanics that impact performance and scaling workloads. Solid foundations in highly available system design, maintenance and operation. A willingness to be on-call. A willingness to write code to a software engineer level or send in changes to the dev team/s to help optimise queries, drivers, connection pool settings/timeouts or ORM usage (shudder).
I think the days of a pure DBA role are coming to a close in technology lead organisations. Maybe not in banking/insurance or other orgs where DBAs found a home to sit in the back office doing minute query tuning on a reporting query etc.
If more developers have read and understood the content in https://use-the-index-luke.com/ then there would be less need for DBAs.