During the recent CouchConf in San Francisco, Frank Weigel, a Couchbase product manager, touted the benefits of schemaless databases: without a schema, developers may add fields without going through a DBA. The audience of developers seemed pleased, but I wondered what a DBA might think.
Based on my experience, the roles of DBAs in enterprise IT vary. Some engage in database development. Others focus exclusively on operations. But DBAs generally own production databases; all production schema changes go through them. This control would go away under NoSQL. In the schemaless world of NoSQL, developers have more power and more responsibility. Through their code, developers control the schema, access rights, and data integrity.
What is left for DBAs? There is always operations: monitoring performance and adjusting resources as needed. But these are general system administration tasks, not necessarily requiring experts trained in relational databases. So will NoSQL put DBAs out of work? Will the DBAs, with their cubicle walls covered in Oracle certifications, stand up against this invader?
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’ve not seen any evidence to suggest that NoSQL is taking hold in enterprise IT. With the exception of large, customer-facing systems, enterprises do not need the scalability promised by NoSQL. And many key enterprise systems require transactions that span records, a feature lacking in NoSQL systems. While document-oriented and graph databases might fit well for certain use cases, the value proposition for NoSQL in the enterprise has yet to become compelling.
And despite the disadvantages of fixed schema for developers, the fixed schema of relational systems has a larger value within enterprises. Ideally, these schema define in one location the rules of data integretity, which makes it easier to audit all changes.
While I could foresee conflicts between developers and DBAs over NoSQL in enterprises, that does not need to be the case. Most enterprise systems will continue to run on relational databases. The DBA role of managing these systems will not go away anytime soon. If enterprises do see any value in NoSQL for certain use cases, they should define policies around which sorts of applications might use this new technology. NoSQL, as many have commented, may well stand for Not Only SQL, in which case it can coexist with DBAs within the confines of corporate policies and procedures.
Jim Downey 
Hi Jim,
It’s great that NoSQL can coexist with DBAs. Although I don’t know a lot about cloud computing, I understand that this is important for IT and businesses. I’ve found that your blog is very informative on cloud computing.
At the moment, I’m looking for bloggers and contributors for a storage virtualization, cloud computing and big data website. Would you perhaps be interested in contributing your past and future blog articles? We want this website to be a thriving community of experts generating conversations on big data, cloud computing and storage virtualization.
It’s free to join, and only the title and the first few sentences of your blog entries will be published on the website. We want readers to engage with your content and be directed to your blog for the full article. This way, you’ll get traffic! 🙂
If you’re interested or have any questions, please send me an email at tinajin [at] atomicreach.com with “Tech” in the subject line. I’ll be glad to answer any questions and get you started on being an expert contributor!
Sincerely,
Tina Jin