{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/database-administrators/",
  "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology",
  "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.",
  "scored_at": "2026-08-11",
  "model": "claude-opus-5",
  "occupation": {
    "title": "Database Administrators",
    "soc_code": "15-1242",
    "category": "Tech",
    "us_employment": 69990,
    "median_annual_wage": 104620
  },
  "verdict": "EXPOSED",
  "risk_resistance": 38,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 9,
    "embodiment": 4,
    "liability_shield": 4,
    "trust_premium": 8,
    "judgment_accountability": 13
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "Index recommendations, execution-plan tuning, backup scripting, replication setup, and version upgrades are all now either autopiloted by RDS/Autonomous or one prompt away, which caps this at 9 — the remainder that holds is capacity modelling against a specific business's growth curve and untangling a multi-terabyte corruption with no clean restore point.",
    "embodiment": "A 4 reflects the residue of racked on-prem servers — walking a datacentre to reseat a failed disk array or attend a cutover window — but the overwhelming majority of the job is SSH, a console, and a ticket queue that can be worked from anywhere.",
    "liability_shield": "No state licence gates database administration; Oracle OCP, Microsoft or AWS certifications get you shortlisted but no regulator can pull them, and when a breach happens it is the company that answers under HIPAA or SOX while the DBA answers to their manager.",
    "trust_premium": "An 8 recognises that developers escalate to the DBA they trust with prod credentials and that auditors want a familiar name walking them through access controls, but the artifact you deliver — a schema, a grant, a restored table — is judged on whether it works, not on who produced it.",
    "judgment_accountability": "13 is earned in the 2am window: deciding whether to fail over, roll back a migration mid-flight, or accept data loss to restore service is a call with no runbook and real revenue attached, and schema and partitioning decisions bind the application for years — it stops short of 14+ because most weeks are change-control tickets under an approved process."
  },
  "rationale": "The bread-and-butter DBA workload — writing and tuning SQL, building indexes, scripting backups, provisioning instances, patching, generating capacity reports — is exactly what managed cloud services (RDS, Aurora, Autonomous Database) and code-generating models already handle at usable quality. What resists is the accountable side: designing schemas and partitioning strategies for a specific business's growth curve, owning the recovery when a production database corrupts at 2am, and defending data access controls to auditors. The occupation is not disappearing so much as compressing toward fewer, more senior data-platform owners per company.",
  "outlook": "Headcount keeps drifting down as managed cloud databases absorb routine administration, while the remaining roles pay more and look increasingly like data-platform engineering with on-call accountability.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Task-mix compression: once managed services and code models absorb index tuning, backup scripting, patching and capacity reporting, what remains per company is schema/partition design against an unknown growth curve, cross-system data modeling, and live corruption recovery — work where the cost of a wrong call is unbounded and the context is proprietary. The occupation genuinely has two tiers, and headcount falls while the surviving role's resistance rises.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "Named-individual accountability regimes for data systems: EU DORA (in force Jan 2025) requires financial entities to maintain a register of ICT assets with identified responsible parties and board-level accountability for resilience testing; UK/EU GDPR Art. 32 audits and SEC cyber-disclosure rules (Item 1.05) push firms to designate a specific person who attests that backup, retention and access-control configurations are as described. If audit standards harden that attestation into a signed, personally-defensible statement about database controls, the DBA/data-platform owner becomes the signer.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 5
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "Post-incident regimes that assign the recovery decision to a named human: if breach-notification and operational-resilience rules (DORA severe-incident reporting, state breach laws) require a documented human decision on restore point, data-loss acceptance and failover under time pressure — i.e. the RPO/RTO call cannot be delegated to an autonomous system — the role's ownership of consequential ambiguous calls is formalized rather than assumed.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "Healthcare and government contracting: HIPAA Security Rule updates (HHS Dec 2024 NPRM) proposing mandatory annual technical-control verification and asset inventories, and FedRAMP/CMMC assessment requirements, both push toward an identified individual certifying database access controls and encryption state to an assessor.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "No plausible trust_premium route: buyers of database work are internal IT budgets and auditors, not consumers who can prefer a human — nobody pays extra to know a person wrote the partition key. Embodiment has no route; the residual on-prem/rack work is shrinking. Even with strong liability levers, the shield attaches to a shrinking number of senior seats, so the score can rise while the worker count falls."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 85870,
        "wage": 96710
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 80520,
        "wage": 99890
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 76140,
        "wage": 101510
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 73180,
        "wage": 104620
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 69990,
        "wage": 104620
      }
    ],
    "from": 2021,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": -18.5,
    "comparable_from": 2021,
    "spans_soc_revision": false
  },
  "pivots": [],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}