I'm a database administrator. I was lucky enough to work my way up into that position at my current employer. My main duty is to keep the databases up and accessible, which allows the company to function. The most interesting thing I have been doing lately is migrating our onprem (virtual) databases up to AWS and Azure (although we are now going all in on AWS). We have migrated a few major systems that only allow for minimal downtime (15 - 30 minutes tops) so we have to replicate the data from onprem up to the cloud and keep the data in sync at the transactional level, until its time to switch application traffic over to the new database, and there has to be a plan in place to rollback to the old database with no data loss. Lots of moving parts and planning to make this successful. I really do enjoy the work. Of all the IT positions I feel like database is right for me and I just survived the second IT layoff of the year so others probably agree too.

The one thing I feel we need to do is get off of microsoft sql server and move to aurora mysql so we can save costs on licensing and take advantage of more AWS serverless features, such as auto scaling. Unfortunately the engineers need to be on board and so far the people that make the decisions are not.

I started at the company in phone technical support, moved to the Network Operations Center, moved to DBA, moved to senior DBA, and now I have the title of IT DevOps Engineer II, although I still feel more like a DBA than my current title.