While developers don’t think they need them, DBAs are still needed for governance to make it easier to analyze data.
DBAs have gone from managing databases tobeing data engineers across multiple systems. They focus on how data moves from one database to another, the consumption of data, tuning of the data, and management of the data process across the data landscape is critical until it is distributed and executed automatically.
DBAs have moved from being focused on individual products like SQLServer and Oracle to having to deal with bringing companies’ big data implementation to life.
There are a lot of points here. I agree with many, disagree with a few, and think that some of them are quite context-sensitive. But all are worth thinking about.