The DBA role has always been misunderstood. But ask a senior database professional what their week looks like today, and it becomes clear how much it has evolved over the years. Cloud spend dashboards, AI-generated pull requests, 30-second downtime windows – these are just some of the new elements that make up the DBA role today. 

We sat down with Lee Brownhill, a senior DBA and Redgate Ambassador with 20 years of experience, to get his honest take on where the role is heading – and what database professionals are actually focused on right now. 

This article is part of the How to build a career in data series on Simple Talk. 

The DBA role of today: a brief introduction

The DBA role is dramatically broader than it was even a few years ago. Cloud costs, DevOps, security & compliance, AI oversight, and observability have all been added on top of the traditional core. 

Likewise, job titles vary significantly. “Database Reliability Engineer,” “Database Engineer,” “Principal DBA,” and “Senior DBA” can all refer to essentially the same role. Seniority levels aren’t standardized, either, so the title reflects the company – not necessarily the person’s influence. 

So, how do you break through the noise and actually become a DBA, and succeed in the role? What should you be focusing on right now? 

Well, the team at Redgate recently sat down with Lee Brownhill (a former guest of the Simple Talk podcast), to chat about his role as a Senior DBA and get the lowdown on what exactly the role entails today. 

The DBA role today: what you should know (6 key points) 

Here are the 6 key takeaways from the chat – and some may surprise you! 

1. AI’s had an impact on stability 

AI is enabling developers to generate more code, faster. As a result, pull requests are getting larger and broader in scope. The DBA often sits at the end of that pipeline as the final human control point – responsible for reviewing whether changes are safe, secure, and performant at scale. 

This can present challenges, with teams distributing review responsibility to “performance champions” or “security champions” within sub-teams. In turn it’s introducing additional risk, as these people often lack the DBA’s depth of context about how SQL will behave under volume or in specific parts of the product. 

As Lee puts it: “How to handle that (AI) in a proactive and safe manner is getting infinitely more difficult, with the sheer level of change coming into products – and the rate of change as well.” 

2. There’s also uncertainty around investment in AI 

There’s industry pressure to adopt AI, but the landscape shifts so fast that teams are caught between not wanting to fall behind and not wanting to invest in something that doesn’t mature. DBAs are being consulted, yes, but the decisions are typically owned by engineering managers and principal engineers. 

There’s also growing vendor fatigue; the many AI pitches promising to “solve all your problems” have made DBAs cynical. Plain, honest messaging cuts through better than hype. 

“The landscape is shifting that much at the moment, it’s hard to know what will stick and what won’t,” Lee says.”I think some clear, non-AI kind of speech and messaging will go a long way.” 

3. Cost optimization is a core part of a DBA’s day-to-day 

Cost optimization has become a core part of the DBA’s day-to-day – especially around the cost of cloud adoption – with lots of time spent in financial dashboards. 

The common pattern Lee outlined? Businesses scale Azure resources by bumping up a performance slider whenever volumes spike, until costs become unsustainable. 

So, tools that help surface right-sizing opportunities, idle resources, and evidence-based cost decisions, are highly valued now. In fact, they’re no longer just a ‘nice-to-have’ – they are top of mind for today’s DBA. 

“Pretty much every engineering team I work with now… everybody almost has a cost initiative task to do, because cloud resources are not getting any cheaper,“ Lee says. 

“It’s never been more important to optimize your costs. I spend so much time in financial dashboards looking at cloud costs, looking at peaks and troughs in database usage.” 

4. DBAs are now key security and compliance stakeholders 

In regulated industries, DBAs are being pulled increasingly into auditing and access control discussions. Security constraints also directly limit AI adoption as anything that sends data outside the company’s own tenant is a no-go. 

Beyond AI, DBAs themselves are more deeply involved in security and audit conversations now. “DBAs are getting increasingly pulled into auditing and access control situations and conversations,” Lee points out. 

“That’s where a lot of my time is being spent as well. They want a database professional who’s there to give a level of authority from the data level in those questions.”   

5. DevOps & automation is the rule – not the exception 

The shift from manual DBA work to fully code-driven CI/CD pipelines is stark. In Lee’s previous role, he says, it was common to work with manual scripts – but now, everything is repository-based. DBAs who resist this shift, or don’t have the DevOps skills needed, are simply left behind. 

As such, Lee – like many DBAs – is actively upskilling in database deployment automation. This includes using tools unfamiliar to him like Redgate Flyway, and broader Azure tooling. He acknowledged some DBAs find this uncomfortable, but sees it as unavoidable. It’s just what you have to do to keep up as a DBA today. 

It’s also a good mindset to have in general. Personal development and learning new skills – especially the ones helpful to the role you’re currently doing, or the role you want – is more necessity than choice if you want to succeed. 

6. Observability & high availability have never been more important 

Real-time visibility into what’s happening in the database is now essential, with periods of downtime increasingly becoming unacceptable.  

Knowing the ‘hot points’ of a database – the areas already under stress – is something experienced DBAs carry in their heads, and something AI-generated code changes often fail to account for. 

“The expectancy now for always available, always there – it’s just a given,” Lee says. “You can’t have services unavailable for 30 seconds. It’s just not a thing anymore. 

“Knowing what is happening in your database in real time has never been more important… when you’re fighting a performance problem, you need to see what’s in flight right there, what it’s affecting.”   

Summary: the DBA role of today is a different proposition to what it once was 

“I can’t believe how narrow this role used to be”, Lee says. “I actually really enjoy dipping my hands into all these different technologies now — because I have to.” 

“When I first started as a DBA, it was more about: do our backups run nicely, and have we got maintenance running every night? Whereas now I spend so much time in financial dashboards, really looking at cloud costs, looking at peaks and troughs in terms of database usage.”   

“I’m having to learn a lot more in the DevOps space than I’ve had to before: code‑driven pipelines…new monitoring tools. And, interpreting logs from an observability point of view, to build up a picture of what happened last night at two in the morning.”   

What are your thoughts? Are you a DBA? Have any tips and advice you’d like to share? Feel free to leave a comment below!