There are more job openings for qualified, skilled IT professionals, than there are individuals to fill the jobs. DBAs are specifically hard to recruit because the skills required to be a good DBA span multiple disciplines. These skills are difficult to obtain, and to make matters more difficult, the required skill set of a DBA is constantly changing. To effectively manage enterprise databases, a DBA must understand both the business reasons for storing the data in the database and the technical details of how the data is structured and stored. The DBA must understand the business purpose for the data to ensure that it is used appropriately and is accessible when the business requires it to be available.
Appropriate usage involves data security rules, user authorization, and ensuring data integrity.
Availability involves database tuning, efficient application design, and performance monitoring and tuning. These are difficult and complicated topics. Indeed, entire books have been dedicated to each of these topics. The technical duties of the DBA are numerous. These duties span the realm of IT disciplines from logical modeling to physical implementation.