A manager I am starting to read more and more is Redmond News. It reminds me of the days where I was trying to keep up with the rapid pace of Microsoft technologies being released. The last issue discussed how normal developers are taking on database administrator roles. This is in addition to their normal development duties.The article did agree that DBAs are still required in the enterprise. However there is a general drive to do more with less. Agile developers are taking over traditional DBA roles. In addition, past DBAs are starting to do development work. This is because there are fewer and fewer hard core DBA jobs out there.
Microsoft is released the next version of SQL Server in the first half of 2010. It is code named Kilimanjaro. There has been some talk in the SQL Server community about the desire to integrate SQL Server management tools into Visual Studio. SQL Server 2005 had the Visual Studio shell for SQL Server management.
On our own team, we used to have a number of full time DBAs. Now we are down to just one. And he is a subcontractor. There are a couple other individuals who pitch in with DBA work on an as-needed basis.
