AI will eliminate DBA Jobs faster than you think

I listened to “Surviving the A.I. Endgame” this weekend and realized: I’ve become one of the believers that AI advances are very likely to completely change tech and knowledge roles as we know them over the next 10 years. This is going to dramatically shrink the workforce across MANY roles (and many of those impacted will be outside of the tech sector). It isn’t that people won’t be needed anymore, but far fewer people will be needed. Including people with database administrator (DBA) roles like mine.

Database administrators have been hearing that technological improvements will mean DBAs are no longer needed for 20+ years, though. So, as a DBA, why would I start believing this now?

I’m not an AI fanboy. I’m not an AI opponent.

This post is about what I believe is likely to happen– not what I want to happen. I’m not labeling this prediction as a “good” or “bad” outcome, either.

This is what my experience has led me to believe is coming.

I’ve been working with an AI agent

Lately I’ve been writing a fair amount of Python with an AI agent. If you’ve mostly used AI chat experiences, I think the Agent experience is pretty different. Agents can do things like:

• Apply changes for you in multiple files, verify that they work, then let the user modify them, accept them, or reject them.
• Handle multiple complex steps – like verifying how it is doing at a task, noticing problems in its approach, and adapting its approach
• Report on what it is doing, and take further input from the user while it is still working.

In many ways I feel like I can see the software team behind the agent do things as time goes on, because I feel like the agent is gradually getting better at learning when and how to identify its own mistakes before telling me it’s done with a task.

I’ve also noticed that there’s a learning curve for me: as I get better at providing the right context from files and sources for tasks, my results get better. As I get better in understanding how as a user I can shape the Agent’s behavior, I can give the Agent instructions that make it better at handling things it doesn’t start out being very good at.

The agent dramatically increases my ability to get things done, to the point where it’s not too hard for me to see how my role in the situation may rapidly become optional, then unnecessary.

Reflections on responding to database performance incidents

“Happy databases are all alike; every unhappy database is unhappy in its own way.” Anna Karenina principle

While there are plenty of bizarre bottlenecks and performance situations that one can find with databases, responding to database performance incidents generally involves doing a set of very similar tasks to collect information, diagnose what is going on, and suggest next steps and mitigations. There is a fairly short list of “frequent fliers” that are very commonly causes of bad performance that one can check for as part of this process, and verify them or rule them out.

This set of tasks and diagnostic rules are fairly complex. I’ve had plenty of success in teaching other people these tasks and rules, but up to this point I didn’t think that this could be automated.

After my recent experience working with an Agent I don’t think it’s gonna be long before we get there, though.

An AI Agent doesn’t have to be perfect– just make fewer mistakes than a person

DBA jobs won’t be the first to be replaced by AI agents because of the risk associated with data loss. However, I think the quality of AI Agents will become high enough that it starts to make sense.

Agent quality isn’t the only factor, however. Cost is also a factor in the algorithm. AI agents can be expensive, but so are human employees.

But Kendra, AI is bad at SQL

Oh, I agree, I have plenty of examples of LLMs spewing utter nonsense and writing garbage SQL.

My views are largely informed by my experience using an AI Agent to get DBA projects done that require lots of automation. I’ve certainly generated SQL scripts in the course of this, but they’ve been fairly simple and related to working with metadata. The AI Agent is already pretty excellent at all of this stuff.

My belief is that the tooling will continue to improve rapidly and that this will cross into other areas. I think different languages/work areas will have agents that are tuned for those areas. I think it will get good at even complex SQL. And I think this evolution is going to continue to be quite rapid.

What’s a DBA to do?

Depends on your personality, really. If you’re a startup-y type, there’s probably decent money to be made with jumping on the AI Agent Tooling Building Bandwagon.

If you’re not a startup-y type, there’s plenty of time to gather more data and see if my little 10 year prediction here is totally bonkers or not.