Integrate Emerging Technology
Integrating emerging technology is something that can make an incredible impact on any company. The DBA is often the one that could do it best, but they don't have time. Moving into the areas of emerging technology may be just what you need to do. 
Jobs under the Chief Information or Chief Innovation Officer may be a way to get more into this area. Some of the great benefits of the Oracle database are the many ways that you can integrate other things with Oracle. Consider Virtual Reality (VR) that can now be integrated in some way with your data (the Metaverse comes to mind), or a VR world where people can shop for your product. How about Mixed Reality (MR), where part of it is VR, and part of it is your current world? The customer uses a headset where they can see your product in their living room. Augmented Reality (AR) might allow your workers to see statistics from the database (such as the current quantity in stock) as they look at items in the warehouse or a QR code of an item. AR can also allow customers to look at an iPad with your item in their living room.
Here Come the Robots
They've been building robots for many years (Lost in Space comes to mind). The problem has always been that we don't have the speed for true Machine Learning to get a robot to do what we really want (Exadata & the Internet come to mind). 
Another issue is getting the Wall Street money to fund the really big projects (okay, we have that now). Get an Exadata that fits into the head of the latest robot people are building, add a little Machine Learning, and you're there (or have the robot go to the Oracle Cloud & have it run on the OCI Supercluster with 32,768 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs each with 2TB/sec memory bandwidth - that's 64 PB/s or 1 Exabyte every 15 seconds). The Digital Transformation, as represented by Gerd, is starting to become a reality (I've added Elon Musk's Neural Link for the brain to the image; perhaps it will go to the OCI Supercluster as well in the future). One thing is for certain, we have moved from the mainframe to the PC to the cloud. We're now moving from our iPhones/Androids to things like integrated watches. We'll move to implanting digital next. Why are we moving in this direction? Perhaps to compete with the robots (next section) that keep coming closer to competing with our abilities. It could also just be a way to integrate the internet more and share information faster. We've definitely started to enter the Twilight Zone and beyond with some of the latest inventions coming.
This section & the previous one on emerging technology leads us into a head-on collision that many people will face in the coming years - a replacement of many jobs by robots. While most people shudder, I think of the many AT&T operators (Lily Tomlin comes to mind), bowling pin setters, ice cutters, street lamp lighters, typesetters, and many jobs that got replaced by automation. Rod Serling, talking about robots, said, "The competition between man's mind and the product of man's mind, for this, there is standing room only in the Twilight Zone." The future here is both exciting and scary at the same time. I remember seeing a guy with a robotic arm that he used as a tattoo artist. I thought if he wanted to be a barber instead, he would be Edward Scissorhands. The future is undoubtedly already here if you haven't noticed. You just may want a job that's a little more fun, like integrating robots, instead of recovering the database.
Go from DBA to Manager
Before I ever became a CEO or CIO, I was a coder, integrator, app developer, hardware fixer, and problem solver of last resort. But there is a time when you have to take what you've learned and start to lead the team of developers, DBAs, emerging tech folks, robotics engineers, or another area because you're the only one that knows how or you're the only person willing to step down to becoming the manager & give up the joy (or fever) of coding.
"Someone younger and stronger comes along to fill your shoes, and a person has to gracefully step aside. Well, I'm just not willing to do that" (from Barney Miller). DBAs have found out that nobody came to fill their shoes. Nobody wanted that job, so they keep the lights on. I still enjoy doing some DBA work. But maybe you're the only one that really understands why 80% of the Machine Learning projects are failing and know you can help turn those into successes (with the correct data at the correct time from all the right places with all the right professionals). If it's not you at your company creating the future, it just may be some startup that replaces what your company does and replaces your company by leveraging some of the latest technology you've seen in this article. That's where I've headed!
References:
- DBAs Next Great Job, (presentation), Rich Niemiec
- Larry Ellison Keynote at CloudWorld
- Oracle 23c; Oracle CloudWorld, Andrew Mendelsohn
- Oracle 23c; Oracle CloudWorld, Jenny Tsai-Smith & Dominic Giles
- Preparing for Oracle 23c, Rich Niemiec
- https://blogs.oracle.com/authors/mark-hornick
- Oracle12c Release 2 Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques; Richard J. Niemiec; Oracle Press
- viscosityna.com, www.oracle.com, & technet.oracle.com
- All companies and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of the respective owners
- Rich Niemiec ©2023. This document cannot be reproduced without expressed written consent from Rich Niemiec or Viscosity NA, but may be reproduced or copied for article, presentation, and conference use by the author.
- Neither Viscosity nor the author guarantees this document to be error-free. Please provide comments/questions to richniemiec@gmail.com – niemiec@viscosityna.com; I am always looking to improve!
SUBMIT YOUR COMMENT