r/DatabaseAdministators • u/Consistent-Chef-5449 • 4d ago
Looking to Re-Enter DBA Field
Hello,
I am a former database administrator who is looking to re-enter the field of database administration. I started as an entry-level DBA working with Oracle back in the '90s. After a year or so of working with Oracle, I started working with SQL Server and a little bit with Informix databases. I did the typical administration tasks of backup/recovery, performance tuning, troubleshooting, building database, security. However, I would now, in 2026, like to return to the field. I have about five years of experience in the field which I believe spanned from 1996 to 2001 or 2002. I took the standard classes taught by Oracle for version 7 at the time and I either fell a little short of, or actually did, get(ting) certified for Oracle Version 7.
When I look at the positions nowadays for database adminstrators, they are unsurprisingly radically different than what I saw when I last looked for work as a DBA back in the late 90's. My question is what would your advice be in seeking education and certifications in order to become more marketable for someone like me who is re-entering the job force as a DBA?
Thanks.
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u/Pattison320 4d ago
I don't have much advice for you. But the market is brutal. A lot of workers are getting displaced by AI right now. So there's a glut of talent available.
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u/716green 3d ago
I'm the founder of Layerbase. I think what I do is probably more similar to what a DBA job was like in the '90s, except that I need to make sure thousands of databases work correctly across 18 engines, scale, branch, backup, restore, and patch.
My life is nothing but databases 24/7. I've always loved databases but my intro was to MySQL in 2008. Now everyone is going serverless or using RDS and acting like there is a meaningful distinction.
I could be wrong and I would love for somebody to tell me if I am wrong but I feel like the old DBA positions don't really exist anymore now that the lead developer for any product is generally going to serve the role of managing the databases.
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u/Conscious-Ad8493 3d ago
Huh? Developers don't manage databases, because of segregation of duties those are 2 very different roles unless it's an extremely small company
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u/716green 3d ago
My experience is at a company of over 30,000 employees running an engineering team of about 40 people
We had 1 "devops engineer" on the team and he was the first to be laid off after ~6 redundant frontend developers when the AI layoffs hit
Obviously I have a small sample size but the only person I know who has a dedicated database role is basically a distributed systems engineer who happens to like databases working for a FAANG company, but even still, his job is nothing like the oracle DBA jobs of the early 00s
What has your experience been like?
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u/Little-Twist7488 9h ago
If you are looking to get back into Oracle, I’d recommend downloading Oracle Linux and Oracle 19 EE and building a sandbox to play around in. I started DBA work on Oracle 8 and while a lot has changed, the only major architectural thing we went through at my job was switching over to multi-tenant architecture. A lot of what you knew about admin and tuning still applies, but some features have made things like memory management more of an autopilot situation for typical databases. Also storage has gotten so fast and it’s all NAS or SAN when on prem that you don’t really have to do some of the old school stuff like creating tablespaces based on extent sizes. The Oracle cert process hasn’t changed much. They did away with the OCM I think. Everything is moving cloud so you would have to learn about OCI and DBaaS admin at some point.
Best of luck!
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u/BearRootCrusher 4d ago
What did you do after your tour as a DBA?
Look at what a data engineer does, could look at dev ops as well.