Christos Kalantzis, Engineering Manager of Cloud Persistence Engineering at Netflix, will talk about his transition from a database administrator to a database engineer working with cutting edge big data technology. He will provide expertise and insight into how he learned about new technologies and the use cases he now gets to work on.

1. Keep the DB, lose the A
How DBA’s could shed the Admin
title and become DB Engineers

2. What’s Covered
• Brief History of Databases
• Skills DBAs (should) have today
• What is a DB Engineer
• Skills required to become a DB Engineer

3. Brief History of Databases
1960s
• First databases
– Hierarchical model IMS
• IBM used Sabre to help AA with their reservation
system
– Network model
CODASYL

4. 1970s
• Thanks to EF Codd, Relational Databases
model made its debut
• Ingres - QUEL
• Ingres, Sybase, MS SQL Server
• System R – SEQUEL
• Oracle, DB2
• Entity relational models

5. 1980s
• Structured Query Language (SQL) became the
standard query language
• Introduction of personal computers saw the
rise of dBase III, Watcom SQL, Paradox, etc…
SELECT name FROM employees
WHERE salary > 1000000

6. 1990s
• Internet pushed RDBMS to its limits
– Databases no longer used for internal company
applications
We need I’m giving you all
more power! she’s got, Captain!

7. 2000s
• Increased data demands have led to new data
models and database implementations, OLTP and
Analytical
– Sharding RDBMS
– NoSQL
• MongoDB
• Apache Cassandra
• CouchDB
• Etc.
– Map Reduce
• Hadoop

8. Today’s DBA
• Data Design ER Modeling
– Third normal form
– SQL Aren’t I something!
• Database product expert
– Oracle/SQL Server/DB2/MySQL
• OS Administration
– Unix/Linux
– Windows
• System Engineering
– Hardware choice
– SCSI/IDE/SATA/SAN/NAS/iSCSI/RAID/SSD
• Scripting
– BASH
– Batch or PowerShell
– Perl

9. DB Engineer
• More than a DBA
• Not a Software Engineer (in a good way!)
Hello there!
Umm….hi

10. DB Engineer skills
• New Data design concepts
– RDBMS Sharding
– NoSQL
– Distributed Databases

11. DB Engineer skills, continued
• New Database products
– MongoDB
– Apache Cassandra
– HBASE
• Running on commodity Hardware or
Virtualization

12. DB Engineer skills, last one...I swear!
• Application Architecture
– Availability
– Scalability
– Consistency (eventually)

13. DB Engineer skills, I lied, this is the last one
• Programming
– .NET public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello, World");
– Java }
}
– Ruby, Rails
– Python, Django
– Groovy, Grails

14. Q&A
Thank you
Christos Kalantzis
@chriskalan
Engineering Manager - Cloud Persistence
Netflix Inc.
ckalantzis@netflix.com
Hiring!
jobs.netflix.com