For a while the new features in database automation had some DBAs scared that their jobs would somehow become obsolete in short order.

Paul Boutin’s recent article in Valley Wag discusses Robert Cringley’s declaration of the Death of the Database  that has everyone all excited.  At root is the idea of cloud computing, and the likes of the Google’s of the world storing all of our data, and managing all the dirty messy database storage seemlessly for us.

Yes, I’ll give you that for many applications, and small websites, this will certainly be the future.  Who wants to manage a database for every website.  But for the large clients of Oracle databases, the terrabyte datastores, datawarehouses, Oracle applications, and Financials, the backend datastore will remain a requirement.  This isn’t necessarily because a third party can’t do the job better, or that it wouldn’t make a business sleep better at night leaving the database management to the experts.   Nor is it that security couldn’t be implemented properly, to make the data available only to the business, and invisible to the prying eyes of the DBAs down the line.  No all of those problems are solvable.

The problem is one of handing over the keys to the kingdom.  Take the worldwide GPS system, for example.   Currently Europeans, Russians, and Chinese alike rely on a US built satellite system for GPS service.  Imagine military operations relying on US technology were the US to get into a scuffle with the Russians or the Chinese.  In the end business wants to see their data, if not physically, then confident of where those servers are, and who touches the data, the hardware, the backups etc.

I do agree with Cringley and Boutin that cloud computing will change things, and continue to put pressure on the big database vendors like Oracle, but I don’t think it’ll put them out of business anytime soon.