The DBA Shortage That Wasn’t Budgeted For

In DataStrike's 2026 Data Infrastructure Survey, 74% of IT leaders said their budgets would grow this year, and yet only about a third of the organizations surveyed employ a dedicated DBA. Among the organizations with DBAs, more than half rely on just one or two people to manage Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, and all cloud databases, despite a quarter saying they'd need five or more to keep up.

Sixty percent of organizations now lean on managed service providers for data infrastructure, more than double the share a year earlier. On paper, that looks like a cost-efficient solution: after all, a DBA average salary runs north of $120,000 while an MSP contract can flex up or down with demand, and the work still gets done. The trouble is that a database doesn't just need maintenance; it needs continuity. A DBA who has lived with a system knows about items that never make it into a ticket, and that's the first thing to go when the team shrinks or rotates:

• The tuning goes reactive. Adjustments that used to happen before anyone felt them start happening after a page goes off. The system is still running, but it's being reacted to rather than tended.
• Upgrades move from planned to overdue. With no one owning the calendar, upgrades and patches drift until they're a scramble instead of a routine.
• Small inefficiencies accumulate. The slow query a DBA would have caught in passing sits untouched, and it compounds into deferred maintenance, which has a way of arriving all at once.

There's a second-order effect the survey hints at, too. Many of the same organizations trimming their database teams are pointing more workloads at those databases: AI features, agent-driven queries, analytics bolted onto the transactional system. Load is going up while the expertise watching it goes down, and a team of one or two is being asked to hold the line on systems that are getting busier and less predictable.

None of this means MSPs or lean database teams are the wrong answer. For many organizations, they're the only realistic ones. But when fewer people are watching the database, the operating model has to change with it. Routine performance work needs to happen continuously and automatically, from spotting repetitive read load to serving it without that load reaching the primary. The right tools can take over much of the ongoing performance work, continuously assessing database health, identifying costly queries, recommending indexes and rewrites, and caching the reads that create the most load, then re-tuning those caches as the workload shifts. That gives a lean team continuous performance coverage at a fraction of the cost.

🔍 What We're Watching in the Database Ecosystem

Bill Gates says there needs to be limits on AI

Gates published a 6,000-word essay arguing AI needs significant limits or the harms will outweigh the benefits, and proposed taxing AI and robots the way payroll tax applies to human employees. He told CNN he was surprised by how fast model capability has moved, and that the review criteria and mitigations he expected to see are missing.

DuckDB outgrows its nest

Amazon is acquiring DuckDB Labs, the Amsterdam company that has employed the core DuckDB maintainers for five years. Jordan Tigani argues Amazon has little reason to close the license, since wider DuckDB adoption drives compute onto their infrastructure, and he expects an AWS service built on the engine eventually. MotherDuck is also picking up enterprise DuckDB support, which it had avoided while that was DuckDB Labs' business model.

In Case You Missed It

Catch us at Percona Live Amsterdam: we're sponsoring Percona Live Amsterdam 2026 (September 9-11), so come say hi if you'll be there. Readyset engineer Marcelo Altmann is speaking on Friday, September 11 (3:10 pm, Matterhorn 1). His talk "What Happened to the MySQL Query Cache?" revisits why the original MySQL Query Cache failed, why key/value caches took over, and how transparent query caching gets low-latency reads while keeping results correct.

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