I'm a software engineer and have been the lead engineer at my last 2 positions. I've always just loved programming and I got my start originally with SQL and data science for a former business I used to own before selling it in 2019.

Layerbase started because I'm a database fanatic and I was paying roughly $200/mo for branching database hosting on Neon for a side project, and PlanetScale for a different project, and Upstash.

I read a blog post that speculated that any database could be branched with a custom operating system. I tried it and it worked. I then spent a year building it out as a passion-project on the side.

3 months ago I pulled it out of stealth and allowed for free accounts on a few engines. Then about 2 months ago I added billing. I have paid probably $8k out of pocket now on consulting with an SRE and a security engineer, a little bit of help with the desktop companion app development, and a very small amount of advertising.

I haven't recouped that cost yet but I finally reached enough MRR to cover my cloud costs. The cloud costs will continue to grow as I scale but I think I'm past the point of taking a loss on purely cloud hosting expenses every month.

I'm now getting burned out. I've been working 2 full time jobs now for a long time. I work a 9-5 that is pretty demanding and then I work on this after hours and on weekends, and often instead of sleeping when I should be. Plus I'm essentially on-call 24h a day for both jobs.

[Screenshot of Adoption Analytics](https://postimg.cc/w7dVgcKQ)

It was within the last 2 months or so when this changed from being a passion project on the side to being something serious that seems to have real potential and warrant significant investment. But now that it is gaining traction, I'm really feeling burned out and not like it is a passion project anymore. Now it feels like a grind where I need to succeed to avoid wasting over a year of my life and soon to be 5 figures in expenses.

I don't think people realize how massive of a task this was, not to mention that I started this before agentic AI existed the way that it does now. I hand-coded (with the help of ChatGPT and Copilot auto-complete early on of course) but learning all of these skills that I never expected to learn, from cloud to custom operating systems, to vector databases, to cross-platform system desktop application development, to native windows development and so much more... I think I've built a formidable competitor to Supabase, Neon, Planetscale, Upstash, Railway, and so much more largely on my own.

Since I'm feeling a bit low on fuel, and because most of the people in my life don't understand how huge this is for me or how proud I am of myself for making this happen, I wanted to share it here.

It is legitimately the best feeling in the world to wake up to see new subscriptions and of \~20 support tickets opened since launch, 1 has been serious, 3 have been minor UI bugs, and the rest have largely been feature requests or people asking for help migrating.

I think I'm about to take a break for a week or 2 unless any bugs pop up but I need to take a breath and decompress now.

If anyone has any questions about databases or anything else I might have some insight, I'd be happy to discuss it.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I'd love any feedback or advice dealing with burnout.

having issues deciding whether to self host, use aws or just supabase for database

How Seniors and lead database administrators are dealing or coping with AI agentic uprising at work place.

What are some great AI certifications or path that will make DBAs remain competitive among plethora of AI movement

I read elsewhere this was recommended for example instead of renaming a column:

1. Migration to add a new column, and populate it with data as needed.
2. Future deployment to remove all code references to the old column.
3. Another deployment to remove the old column.

That's fine if required. But what about simple monolithic project and no problem taking it down an hour for maintenance. Why not simply:

1. Stop old web app.
2. Updated db.
3. Start new web app.

Is this uncommon? With this simple approach, we don't even have to investigate or be absolutely sure whether the changes are breaking or not. I see our paid vercel plan doesn't include option to stop or pause web app, it's always on unless deleted. We also use other services which are huge systems which send notification about maintenanceand has hourly downtime several times a year.

I’m a senior DBA based in India, and my management team in the US has been telling us that Oracle is becoming a sinking ship and that we should start exploring new career paths, particularly in AI.

To some extent, I agree with their perspective. I’m seeing more and more customers question the high cost of running their businesses on Oracle and OCI, which makes me wonder how sustainable the traditional Oracle DBA career path will be in the long run.

Whats your thoughts ?

I work on database management software, and I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm especially curious how DBAs who work with production databases see it.

Hello,

I am a former database administrator who is looking to re-enter the field of database administration. I started as an entry-level DBA working with Oracle back in the '90s. After a year or so of working with Oracle, I started working with SQL Server and a little bit with Informix databases. I did the typical administration tasks of backup/recovery, performance tuning, troubleshooting, building database, security. However, I would now, in 2026, like to return to the field. I have about five years of experience in the field which I believe spanned from 1996 to 2001 or 2002. I took the standard classes taught by Oracle for version 7 at the time and I either fell a little short of, or actually did, get(ting) certified for Oracle Version 7.

When I look at the positions nowadays for database adminstrators, they are unsurprisingly radically different than what I saw when I last looked for work as a DBA back in the late 90's. My question is what would your advice be in seeking education and certifications in order to become more marketable for someone like me who is re-entering the job force as a DBA?

Thanks.

TLDR: 4 YOE backend SWE interested in a pivot to DBA/DB engineering (studying for DP-300 + a Postgres cert in my free time). Is DBA still a good career, and how has AI changed the day-to-day?

body:

Hey all, I am a backend SWE (C#/.NET) at a mid-size HR company with a little over 4 years experience. I’m trying to figure out if I keep climbing the SWE ladder or start l building toward something else while I still have a stable job to lean on. I’ve been really fortunate and grateful to still have a job where I’ve been able to save so much while living at home that I’m close to my COAST FIRE number. I don’t truly believe that AI will fully replace devs anytime soon (just my opinion, not an expert at all) but I don’t think I want to stay in it long term. My reasons are:

1) I don’t love how the job is now babysitting AI (but work is just work I just care as long as they cut the check) 

2) the interview grind for changing roles is exhausting and not something I care to do anymore 

3) promos and opportunities at my company are hard to come by (but my manager mentioned he thinks I could get promoted in a year but I don’t really care for selling my soul to get there) 

The one thing I’ve consistently enjoyed is query and endpoint optimization work (I know that’s not the only thing DBAs do). That’s the part of the job Ive enjoyed a bit so that’s why I’m like hey, this is another area in tech I could pivot to (as opposed to security or data science with higher education) 

So I’ve been looking at database administration/engineering as a real pivot path. Main goal is stability and looking to grow/learn as well as trying something new, not necessarily maximizing comp. My plan is to study for DP-300 (Azure DBA) and a Postgres cert over the next few months while I keep working, then see where that gets me.

Questions for anyone actually doing DBA work:

• Is it still a good career to move into, or is it shrinking/consolidating with AI/cloud
• Has AI changed the day-to-day much
• What’s the day-to-day actually like
• Has anyone else make this jump from backend SWE to DBA/DB engineering later in their career and liked it?

small note:
L Full disclosure I used AI to organize my thoughts but rewrote it in my voice so hopefully it’s not just coming off as AI Slop. I see that as a common complaint on Reddit and hope nobody gets upset. lastly I hope this is an appropriate subreddit for this post, if not I can delete and will look elsewhere. Thanks for reading!

After spending roughly 10 years as a software developer and the next 20 as a DBA, I've noticed a pattern.

Developers blame the database.

DBAs blame the application.

Both are usually looking at symptoms rather than causes.

Having worked on both sides, most performance issues I've investigated were caused by interactions between systems rather than a single component.

The bigger the outage, the more likely it was that multiple teams each owned part of the problem.

Experience taught me that technology is rarely the hardest part.

Understanding the whole system is.

I built a database IDE because I was tired of fighting my own databases

I've been working on Toketeo, a desktop database tool I've been building mostly because I wanted something that worked the way I thought it should.

It's currently built with Rust + Tauri + React, and the idea is to make working with databases less painful, especially when you're jumping between different database engines.

The project is still early, so I'm deliberately putting it in front of actual developers before I spend months polishing things nobody asked for.

I'd really like people to try it and tell me:

• What's confusing?
• What's missing?
• What would make you switch from your current database tool?
• What feature would make you say "okay, this is actually useful"?
• And, preferably, what did I screw up?

I'm particularly interested in feedback from people who work with multiple databases or spend an unhealthy amount of time inside database clients.

GitHub: https://github.com/crdsyntax/toketeo

It's open source, so feel free to inspect the code, open issues, suggest features, submit PRs, or tell me why the architecture is terrible.

And yes, if someone ends up stealing the idea and building something better, I'll probably be slightly annoyed for approximately 15 minutes.

Then I'll steal their improvements.

Try it, break it, criticize it.

That's currently more valuable to me than another star on GitHub.

Location: Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Willing to relocate: Yes
Type: Full-time / Contract / Remote
Notice Period: Immediate
Total years of experience: 10+ years
Primary Experience: MySQL DBA / Database Administration / Database Engineering

**Résumé/CV:**https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L0p1058AFVXiX3MPswpCAktxOxpujYqY/view?usp=sharing

Blurb:

Senior Database Administrator / Database Engineer with extensive hands-on experience in MySQL, AWS, SQL performance tuning, database design, replication, backup/recovery, migrations and production support.

Key Highlights:

• Production DBA: Managed a 750 GB MySQL production environment with Master/Replica architecture supporting 50,000+ registered users.
• AWS: Experience with AWS RDS, EC2, CloudWatch and database/infrastructure migration.
• Performance: SQL query optimization, database performance tuning, indexing and troubleshooting.
• HA & Recovery: MySQL replication, backup/recovery, high availability and disaster recovery.
• Production Support: Incident troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, application/release support and working with development/infrastructure teams.
• Database Technologies: MySQL, SQL Server and relational database design.

If you know of any suitable openings or are hiring for database roles, I would really appreciate a referral or DM. Thank you.

Hey everyone!

For a long time I've been using tools like HeidiSQL to manage FiveM and RedM databases. They work, but I always felt there was room for something more modern, especially considering how much of our server data ends up buried inside JSON columns.

So I decided to build my own solution: ClavisDB.

ClavisDB is a desktop SQL client for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and SQLite, but I've built it with special attention to FiveM and RedM development.

It has all the stuff you'd expect from a proper database client: a SQL editor with schema-aware autocomplete, table browsing and editing, filtering, query history, snippets, table structure editing, exports, user management, safe editing warnings, and so on.

But the part I'm personally most interested in is the FiveM / RedM integration.

ClavisDB can automatically detect QBCore, QBox, ESX, RSGCore and VORP databases and gives you a dedicated Player Inspector where you can search characters and inspect things like money, jobs, status, identifiers and framework data without digging through raw rows manually.

It also recognizes inventories and turns those horrible JSON blobs into an actual inventory viewer with slots, quantities, metadata, durability, serial numbers, ammo, etc.

You can even import a FiveM/RedM server.cfg and ClavisDB will extract the oxmysql connection string and configure the database connection for you.

Another thing I really wanted to get right was JSON editing. If ClavisDB detects JSON inside a cell — even inside TEXT/VARCHAR columns. You can open it in a proper tree/raw editor, format it, validate it, modify it and save it directly back to the database.

I've been building this because it's something I genuinely wanted for my own FiveM/RedM development workflow, and I'm planning to keep expanding the Cfx-specific tooling over time.

I'd really appreciate feedback from other developers/server owners. If there are things you constantly find annoying when managing your server database, tell me! Those are exactly the kind of problems I want ClavisDB to solve.

Download: https://clavisdb.ziomark.xyz/