FinOps and the Evolving Role of the DB Pro by Douglas McDowell

Session Abstract
The role of the DBA has changed. A lot. Now you have to weigh cost versus performance – in the cloud and on-premises. We’ve been chasing performance for decades. However, you can purchase 'endless' performance in the cloud. “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” You might not get enough bang for your buck, aka Return on Investment (ROI). Join me as I discuss the changes in the DBA landscape and examine it through the FinOps lens to gain a deeper understanding of database workloads and prepare you to make informed technical decisions that you can also effectively communicate to your business counterparts.

Speaker Bio
Douglas McDowell is the COO at Fortified, specializing in database monitoring, observability, and FinOps. He has presented at numerous conferences, including the PASS Summit, SQL and Data Saturdays, various Microsoft events, Gartner conferences, and many other business and technical gatherings. Douglas has received Microsoft's MVP award for Data Platform for 11 consecutive years and has been an active volunteer in the data community since 2001. Additionally, he has served on the Microsoft Partner Advisory Council (PAC) for 18 years.