I was chatting with a cloud consultant who was advising on a large scale migration to AWS. He told me that one of the advantages of going for a PaaS offering (Platform as a Service) was that DBAs were no longer required as backups and restores were handled for you. PaaS services for SQL Server include AWS RDS and Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance.

I found it quite a funny conversation, partly as I don’t think he realised being a DBA was part of my job role, but also because I don’t know a single DBA who spends a significant amount of their time doing backups and restores.

It’s true that the services mentioned handle a lot of the routine tasks for you and that is great, it’s also reasonable to hope that they manage databases with greater reliability. Rather than replace the DBA though, they instead free them up to achieve more.

One common pitfall I’ve seen with cloud implementations is to assume that everything is done for you and that can lead to poorly configured services or ones with missing maintenance. It remains important to have access to someone who has a deep understanding of SQL Server when provisioning a cloud service to host your databases. It’s also important they understand the cloud options available and can make sure you have the right settings and instance type etc.

And once things are running you still need someone to turn to when there are problems. These problems are less likely to be hardware related, but you are still going to see occasional performance (or other) issues, just as you would when you were running on-premises hardware.

When those things happen you need access to someone with the right skills to diagnose the problem and perform analysis to define the right solution. Enter the cloud DBA.

As mentioned in my previous post The Importance of SQL Server Performance Tuning in the Cloud, ongoing performance tuning becomes even more important in the cloud as database services are expensive, a performance optimized database is also a cost-optimized one, and you can realise saving immediately.

Brent Ozar talks about the importance of DBAs in the cloud in this post https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2019/06/what-happens-to-dbas-when-we-move-to-the-cloud/. He tells a story that I’m going to quote here:

One of my favorite recent examples was a company who came to me saying, “We’re spending about $2M per year in the cloud just on our databases alone. Can you help us reduce those costs?” Absolutely: with just a couple of days spent query & index tuning, we chopped their biggest database expenses in half while increasing performance.

At the end of that engagement, the CTO told me, “I thought I’d save money in the cloud by not having a DBA, but what I’m learning is that in the cloud, I actually get a return on my DBA investments.”

And it’s not all about performance. Someone recently reached out to me to say that they had mysteriously “lost” about 400GB of free space overnight on an AWS RDS instance running SQL Server, and wanted help identifying the cause. That led to identifying an issue relating to a recent code change that needed fixing.

Of course it’s possible you might not need a full-time DBA in the cloud – or otherwise. That’s where it’s useful to have access to someone who can jump in to perform that role as required. Ideally as they work with you over time they will understand your systems and be able to talk in the context of your applications when discussing problems and solutions.

I can help you with all that. You can find more details of my services here or simply get in touch to discuss what I can do for you.