Cloud computing...will the DBA become an endangered species?

Here is an un-official but interesting article about the future of hosted database services:

https://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/windows_servers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207400585&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_All

 I have witnessed corporate migrations to hosted email and messaging services. Their rationale was that their company did not want to be in the messaging administration business. They would rather find someone who could host their messaging applications and let them focus on their core business competencies. It makes sense that hosted database services is another way for businesses to reduce their IT administrative costs. Although I don't think that high volume OLTP systems will find a home in the cloud, the technologies for delivering the data to the client are there to support relational and especially BI data.

This trend will impact traditional database administrators in two possible ways. As companies migrate databases to hosted solutions, the operational DBA will be the most impacted for obvious reasons. The other way will be the rise of the development DBA. As database technologies become ever more sophisticated, the need for a DBA who can manage the database development process will increase. Already, many companies are realizing that their biggest gap in the development process is someone with the skillset to translate their development requirements into a solid database application.

In summary, I believe that we will see a shift from operational database administration to database application administration. Perhaps DBA will someday become an acronym for DataBase Application or something similar.