Working as a consultant on a managed services team providing remote DBA services has helped me stay current on the open source database ecosystem in the past.

Now that I’m not on customer environments as much, I’ve had to adopt a habit of continuous learning to keep up to date.

If you’re struggling with staying current on the changes in your field keep watching.

Importance of Continuous Learning

It’s just a fact that technology changes fast.

Math Teachers from the 90s are eating their words about not carrying a calculator around everywhere.

And who knew back then that you could get the knowledge of the internet, real and fake, at your finger tips?

Heck we barely knew what the internet was or could be.

I will argue that cloud technologies are driving a big part of this change.

They are so prevalent and inexpensive, it has never been easier to launch a new product or service.

For instance, I remember being cynical about Amazon RDS being viable for production MySQL workloads after working with it for a time.

Boy, I was wrong.

The database-as-a-service industry has exploded in recent years, and RDS worked out a lot of the early complaints I had about it.

And now there is a debate on whether the DBA job will be gone for good. (Hint: It won’t)

But if you aren’t in the habit of learning something every day, you won’t survive in this industry as companies keep improving and evolving.

The benefit of being a Consultant

In my career, I have been lucky to be part of a team offering remote DBA managed services.

I was not just a consultant doing short projects and then moving on.

We were in the weeds with our clients’ teams helping to solve the problems they face month after month.

This gave me real-world experience on a wide range of architectures and issues in the open source database ecosystem.

If I worked on ten clients for a year, all running different architectures and facing different issues, I basically got the equivalent of 10 years experience.

In the open source database world, companies like Pythian and Percona offer you the chance to get this learning opportunity.

Continuous learning takes intentionality

Now that I’m not in that same position, I am finding it harder to keep up to date.

I have to be more intentional with learning.

I do that by reading articles, joining community forums to find out what problems people are solving, and getting hands on with technologies by creating theoretical environments.

Another important aspect of learning is to attend and speak at community events. This is because one of the responsibilities of learning is sharing your experience with others.

Conclusion

You don’t have to be a consultant to keep learning.

But you do have to be intentional, and make continuous learning a habit.

I do that by putting myself around people and places that are using the technologies I want to learn.

So I’m curious: what are you doing to stay current?