For many over the years, they didn’t choose their role. The Accidental DBA was a recognised path into the profession. With platforms and skills changing, I thought it worth asking – are those days behind us?
This route to DBA was straightforward. As Brent concisely put it nearly a decade ago – “stand near the database”.
That was how I got started. I’d written and supported applications backed by SQL Server for years, so I was familiar with the platform. That proved useful when I arrived at the office early one morning to find a recently migrated server was on its knees. Long story short – log backups hadn’t been set up by our outsourced DBAs and the disks were full. That day started a journey to me becoming the ‘Accidental DBA’ replacing the outsourced team.
Many others have similar stories, I’m sure – small businesses, small teams, critical systems, and not enough hands to go around. It’s a wild ride, but eye-opening.
But I can’t see that path stacking up in 2026.
Smaller companies don’t want to deal with expensive assets and their ongoing costs. The cloud removes that friction, with PaaS and SaaS offerings taking care of the maintenance – patching, backups, monitoring. There’s no big, expensive piece of tin with the same criticality which we can stand next to. Databases are created on a whim and scaled to meet demand. The limits that led to challenges and gave us Accidental DBAs have changed.
Experience is key to the role.
Companies hiring a DBA like experience. They want someone to take care of business critical systems, so they’re looking for proven ability. An Accidental DBA will have demonstrated themselves to adapt, troubleshoot and recover environments. Without that experience, its an uphill battle.
That isn’t to say that the opportunity isn’t there, it certainly is. There’s much more availability for junior roles than there used to be. The future DBAs can be onboarded with structured progression instead of ‘first one on the scene’ or ‘Saturday 2am callouts’. That sounds like a move in the right direction.
This isn’t just the case for DBAs either, all data roles have shifted over the years. When I started out we had ‘Database Administrators’ looking after servers and ‘Database Developers’ writing code. Now we still have those in terms of ‘Production DBAs’, ‘Development DBAs’, and over the years other roles have evolved – ‘Data Engineers’ have grown around ETL tools, and ‘Database Reliability Engineers’ are crucial for availability and automation at scale, to name a couple.
There are pathways, they’re just different to the ones of old. Landing in these roles is now about being intentional, not accidental.
There’s an array of opportunities across the data landscape. Whilst the path to DBA was traditionally accidental, its now moved to intentional – and the same goes for other data and technical roles. With the rate of change in products, experience is key. This opens new doors to junior roles where they can be guided by senior mentors.
Personally I loved my journey into DBA and data roles, and I wouldn’t change it one bit. But that doesn’t mean its for everyone. I see more structured paths with modern approaches and tooling would serve the newcomers much better than reaching for AI at 2am to reference 10 year old forum posts.
The Accidental DBA has gone the way of the traditional DBA. They said it would be dead, but it isn’t. It’s just different to what it once was.
Andy Brownsword 