Success now depends on achieving the right balance between automation and human expertise—maintaining governance without sacrificing agility and ensuring security at scale.
As data ecosystems stretch across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, DBA teams must step up by embracing new tools, expanding their scope, and driving the shift toward intelligent, proactive, and cost-efficient data operations.
DBTA recently held a roundtable webinar, The Role of the DBA in 2026: Changes, Challenges, and Opportunities, examining how the role of DBA is constantly changing.
According to Mike Jewett, DBA at United Wholesale Mortgage, presenting for Redgate, AI is reshaping roles faster than organizations are adopting. As data estates expand across platforms and environments, complexity multiplies.
Redgate Monitor is a multi-platform database observability solution for the entire estate, he said.
There are 3 forces reshaping database administration, said Anil Inamdar, director at NetApp Instaclustr PS. This includes automation, cloud-native databases, and AI-driven optimization.
More automation doesn't mean fewer problems. It often means new, harder ones. The more you automate the process; the more critical human judgment becomes at the boundaries. DBAs who understand this don't fear automation, they leverage it, Inamdar said. Data is now a regulated asset. That changes everything about the DBA's role.
There are several ways to protect data and make sure it is complaint, including:
Data access governance: Configuring who can see what, why, and across which platforms.
Encryption and masking at scale: Sensitive workloads in hybrid clouds require encryption strategies that don't kill performance.
Audit trails and data lineage: Proving data integrity for compliance audits and AI model validation.
Zero trust architecture: Least-privilege access across polyglot environments.
DBAs need skills now such as:
- Cloud certifications (AWS/Azure/GCP)
- Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, Pulumi)
- Observability tooling experience (Datadog, Grafana)
- Cross-platform architectural fluency
Early movers are already operating as DataOps and AI infrastructure engineers and the DBA expertise is the foundation, Inamdar said.
The AI equipped database administrator era is here, explained Sanjay Agrawal, CEO and co-founder at Revefi.
The AI empowered DBA designs systems that prevent problems before they exist; orchestrates more than 400 databases via AI agents; reviews and approves AI-generated optimizations; and performs as a cross-platform orchestration architect.
Revefi helps DBAs become proficient with AI by providing:
- Continuous cost optimization. Anomalies flagged the moment they appear.
- Continuously tunes across all workloads. Ticket optional.
- Agents detect, diagnose, and remediate. Most incidents never reach humans.
- An AI empowered DBA can govern 10×more.
For the full webinar, featuring a more in-depth discussion, Q&A, and more, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.