From the Preface

Why We Wrote This Book

This book has been an evolving dream of ours for about five years. Laine came to the DBA role without any formal technical training. She was neither a software engineer nor a sysadmin; rather, she chose to develop a technical career after leaving music and theater. With this kind of background, the ideas of structure, harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration found in databases called to her.

Since that time, she’s hired, taught, mentored, and worked with probably a hundred different DBAs. Us database folks are a varied bunch. Some came from software backgrounds, others from systems. Some even came from data analyst and business backgrounds. The thing that consistently shone through from the best, however, was a passion and a sense of ownership for the safety and availability of the company’s data. We fulfilled our roles of stewards of data with a fierceness that bordered on unhealthy. But we also functioned as a lynchpin between the software engineers and the systems engineers. Some might say we were the original DevOps, with a foot in each world.

Charity’s background is firmly in operations and startup culture. She has a gloriously sloppy history of bootstrapping infrastructures fast, making quick decisions that can make or break a startup, taking risks, and making difficult choices based on severely limited resources. Mostly successfully, give or take. She is an accidental DBA who loves data. She has always worked on ops teams for which there were no specialized DBAs, so the software engineering and operations engineering teams ended up sharing that work.

Doing this for so long and with varied pasts, we’ve recognized and embraced the trends of the past decade. The life of the DBA has often been one of toil and invisibility. Now we have the tools and the collective buy-in to transform the role to that of first-class citizen and to focus on the highest areas of value that the DBA can bring.

With this book, we wanted to help the next generation of engineers have truly happy, productive careers and to continue the impact previous generations had.

Who This Book Is For

This book is written for anyone with an interest in the design, building, and operations of reliable data stores. Perhaps you are a software engineer, looking to broaden your knowledge of databases. You might also be a systems engineer looking to do the same. If you’re a database professional looking to develop your skill set, you will also find value here. If you are newer to the industry, this should also be able to give you a solid understanding. This book, after all, is a framework.

We assume that you already have a baseline of technical proficiency in Linux/Unix systems administration as well as web and/or cloud architectures. We also assume that you are an engineer on one of two paths. On one path, you have existing depth in another discipline, such as systems administration or software engineering, and are interested in developing your technical breadth to include the database engineering discipline. On the other path, you are early- to mid-career and looking to build your technical depth as a specialist in database engineering.

If you are management, or even project management, you can use this book to understand the needs of the datastores that will be underpinning your services. We believe firmly that management needs to understand operational and database principles to increase the likelihood of success of their teams and their projects.

You might also be someone without a traditional technical background. Perhaps you are an accidental DBA who was a business analyst and learned to run databases by jumping into the deep end of the pool. There are many database professionals who have come to the database world via Excel rather than a development or systems job.