Today Mr.Mughees A. Minhas, director of product development/database management was our guest at my company and he gave a presentation on “DBA 2.0” idea. The presentation had three parts:
– Subjects related to how to sustain optimal performance with Oracle database,
– Subjects related to preserve order amid change with Oracle database,
– Subjects related to managing more with less with Oracle database
Lots of nice powerpoint slides related to extra cost options were discussed as usual :) One of my comments after the presentation was Oracle DBAs’ lives are getting much more complicated day by day and what Oracle marketing stuff is forcing IT managers to believe is completely the opposite, this is not fair just to sell more.
Change is of course inevitable and we are all somehow have to accept the changes which are managed by the guys at San Francisco head quarters, but in my opinion forcing management that if they migrate their DBA stuff to version 2.0 somehow everything will be easier and the stuff will be doing absolutely less is not accurate. For example with RAT DBA’s are now also testers, with ASM DBA’s are now storage admins right? Until now Oracle was able to automate easier parts like Memory, Undo, Segment Space management and they aggressively continue to come up with new features which need manual attention. But calling the older DBAs who are using Statspack not Grid Control or file system backup not RMAN as version 1.0, I believe this is not right.
ps: if until now you didn’t read it, here is the paper that started these kind of arguments in my organization: Performing a DBA 1.0 to DBA 2.0 Upgrade
Extract(Read) > Transform(Test&Apply) > Load(Learn) Blog 
Nice article with its collective characteristic. Explains the reason of our internal discussions in the DBA group clearly, Thanks again.
If a DBA cannot do his work without EM and TOAD/PLSQL Developer etc I will not call him a DBA. All of these can crash can fail but when sqlplus fails probably your DB is down too.
Improments about Self management of a DB is awesome, but companies will always need to support that self managed database at least with 2 DBA (so one can go Holiday).
If my manager starts to believe that DB is self managed and DBA is not needed or is not working, I will repy his “When this recovery will finish ” question with “Do you want to sit on the wheel sir, its auto pilot as you think” answer.
IMHO As long as Oracle online DOC stay there with its huge number of pages this marketing strategy will always be bullshit in real life.