Adios DBA, Hello Azure

This post has been a while coming, from some of my posts over the past few months you may have detected a change in direction somewhat - there's still been the odd Oracle thing in there but a lot of other seemingly more random stuff - much of which has been focused around Azure in one form or another.

This reflects a change in career direction for me which i really wouldn't have imagined 18 months ago - i've completed turned my back on the last 20 years working with Oracle - my double OCM, Ace associate, multiple OCP's all the way back since they came out at v7. This isn't a decision I've taken lightly - changing direction when you are so comfortable at what you are doing is not the nicest of feelings - when you first step out into the void (and actually with Azure the learning curve has been more like a wall than a curve) it's pretty stressful - i'm now starting to see the benefits of putting that effort in and heading back in to a comfort zone where i feel i know whats going on and can start making the right decisions for our business.

Since the start of January I am essentially a DBA no more and i guess the knowledge will start to seep away now and before you know it i'll has forgotten it all....

So what's prompted this change you may ask (and I'm sure thats what you're thinking right now) - i'm crazy right - with this skill set what am I doing?

Well a few things prompted the decision

1) Seeing the way the industry is going with PaaS/SaaS vs IaaS
2) Seeing the Azure cloud and what it can do
3) Having done 'everything' with Oracle there was no real challenge any more
4) The death in the short term of what i would call the 'Infrastructure' DBA (there is no denying this job will disappear in 5 years in my view)
5) Oracle's general attitude on licensing and the 'bullying' as i see it of customers - this has made us change our primary port and look to migrate off where possible

Having now worked with Azure, seen the roadmap Microsoft have and seen the amazing things the platform can do is what swung me. Also attending the MS tech summit today in the UK has really reinforced that I've made the right decision - i would defy any oracle person who saw the talk from Scott Guthrie not to be blown away by what Microsoft are doing these days.

From my experience Oracle cloud is simply not in the same league as Azure and AWS - there throwing loads of money into it but it's too late as far as i can see they are just too far behind and aggressively trying to make customers move there will backfire - everyone i talk to is talking about moving off Oracle (maybe thats partly because I'm surrounded by Microsoft people these days.....).

I honestly think now that we'll see Oracle go into decline over the next few years - there are just much better solutions out there. Oracle still has the best RDBMS on the market - but the market is so much more than the database now.

So for now it's adios on the Oracle front - i'll still be blogging at the same account but the content will just be different - maybe you'll start seeing from some of my posts why I'm so sold on Azure and maybe it will make you think about your longer term future.

IT really is a Darwin industry - you evolve or you die - at the moment it feels like we're heading into a mass extinction event and people need to start that evolution........