It’s 2025.

Cast your mind back to 2012 - the cloud was gaining ground, Hadoop was the future, and blogs everywhere declared the DBA role would soon be extinct. Fast-forward to today, and guess what? The DBA is still here, battle-tested, re-skilled, and very much alive.

In this retro-themed session, we’ll take a journey through time, from the turn of the millennium to today, and explore the evolution of the Database Administrator. We’ll rewind to the early 2000s, pause in the 2010s, and hit play in the fast-moving 2020s. You’ll see how the skills, tools, and expectations have changed — and how they’re likely to keep changing.

We’ll cover:

🖥️ SQL Server from 2000 to 2022 and beyond

⚙️ Automation & PowerShell: from scripts to pipelines

🐳 Containers & DevOps workflows

☁️ The cloud-native DBA: Azure, AWS, and hybrid realities

📊 Analytics, observability, and the data-driven DBA

🧠 Non-technical superpowers: soft skills in a hard world

Whether you're a veteran DBA still rocking Management Studio, a data engineer in the making, or just curious how the role has survived and thrived — this talk is your time capsule. Expect nostalgia, perspective, and a good dose of future-facing advice.

The DBA didn’t die. It just levelled up.
“Don’t look back in anger, I heard you say.”