How can you balance automation benefits with human oversight?

Before going for automation check for the end result of the task, i.e. What's your goal for automating this task? Once you have an answer to this, understand the task and come up with how you can automate it. While automation is a great way to get tasks done faster and in an effective way, you should not look down or neglect the manual approach, it's very important. For instance, if anything goes wrong while running automated task (which happens lots of times) it's more difficult to troubleshoot, especially when there's no proper logging. So before going for automation ensure you have a very good understanding of what you're automating.

I would say that while automation can be a powerful tool, it should never replace human oversight and decision-making. Automation can improve efficiency, but it can also introduce errors and biases. Human oversight is important to catch errors, provide context, and make decisions that require judgement and critical thinking. A good balance between automation and human oversight is key to ensuring the accuracy and reliability of a database.

Before you decide to let a program take over a database task, it's like making sure it's the right move. Think about what you'll gain from automating this job, but also what you might miss from not doing it the old-fashioned way. Consider how often you need to do this task. Is it something that changes a lot, or is it pretty straightforward? And don't forget to think about how important it is to keep your database running smoothly and safely. By mulling over these points, you'll figure out if it's really worth it to automate, and how much you'll still need to keep an eye on things yourself.

When it comes to automating your database work, there's a whole toolbox out there. You've got scripts that can run tasks for you, schedulers to do things on time, triggers that set off actions based on certain conditions, rules to keep it all in line, and cloud services that bring a ton of convenience. But the key is to pick the tools that really fit what you need, what you want to achieve, and the particular way your database is set up. You wouldn't want to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut, right? Make sure to give these tools a test run to catch any hiccups before they go live. And just like keeping your car, you should keep an eye on your automation setup, fine-tuning it as needed so it stays on track with any new twists and turns.

Just because you're bringing in some fancy automation doesn't mean you can kick back and let it do all the work. It's still super important to make sure everyone knows what their job is. Talk it out with your team: who's making these cool automation tools, who's going to keep an eye on them, and who'll step in if things go sideways? And it's not just about avoiding crossed wires; it's about making sure that everyone can chip in their two cents. You need a good way to keep track of how things are going, so everyone can see the difference all this automation is making and jump in with ideas to make it even better.

While automation makes work faster, reduces man effort, and reduces human prune error, its also a good work ethic to cross-check automated tasks manually to ensure that it function as expected and no new error introduced. Manual check can also be helpful in some cases because it makes you aware of the tasks that's actually running in case there's need for troubleshooting.

Even though I'm not a DB Admin, but when it comes to Automation it's a way to gain more knowledge when manual check is done on automated tasks, it gives a room to learn and improve because you get to know how tasks are done automatically and when that's done it improves your knowledge about that particular task. Learning from automation is one of the ways to improve both personally and as a team, and it's what has actually been working for me as a DevOps engineer, I get to learn every day from different automation tools I used, and one another important thing to note is before automating any task ensure to have the knowledge of what the expected output will be because that's how you'll know if the task is truly automated.

Automation is a key game changer in any aspect of tech and should be embraced by both individuals and organizations. I used automated tools on a daily basis, I write scripts, which I used to automate most of my daily repetitive tasks. I mitigate tasks manually understand the flow, what's expected and the expected output then put all of this together to automate the task whether by scripting or going with automation tools for that particular task.