You’re going to get all of the servers into pretty good shape – not perfect, but good enough that your phone isn’t ringing every night. Stagnate – keep doing exactly the same thing. Eventually you spend more time doing guidance than managing databases, or they hire a junior DBA in to backfill your production duties. Because you’re more senior than other folks in the shop, you end up giving design guidance. The skills that served you so well troubleshooting a cluster may not help you motivate an employee you don’t like to do a task they hate.Īrchitecture – your constant interactions with developers teach you more and more about building large systems.
Caution, though: this is nothing to do with databases whatsoever. Management – if you have enough IT pros around you, and you’ve got a knack for people skills, you can really shift gears and manage people instead of servers. If you enjoy the job duties and don’t really care for the big picture, contracting can be more lucrative. Consultants tell companies what to do, and contractors do what they’re told.
Instead of working for a single company, you can move around from company to company, giving guidance on how to put out more fires faster.Ĭontract – in some markets, you can keep doing what an employee does, but as an outsider. It’s a wildly different career path than DBA – it involves more time with people, and less time with maintenance plans.Ĭonsult – get technical enough, and develop a reputation for solving tough problems quickly, and you can change gears entirely. There’s never been a better time to help people get actionable insight out of your tables. Write technical presentations to teach your own company’s staff, and then the public.īusiness intelligence – if you’re constantly surrounded by valuable data, and you’ve got a creative eye, you can help make sense out of all those letters and numbers. Get more involved in failover clustering, storage, virtualization, or the cloud.
Get more technical – every time a new project comes in, sharpen your skills. You’ve been managing database servers for a few years.