Tembo dba: Solving Hard DevOps Problems with AI
Tembo’s AI wingman handles database administration so software engineers don’t have to.
By: Nathan Owen
Early in my career, during the 1990s, I considered becoming a database administrator (DBA). At the time, much of my work involved implementing, designing, and tuning databases—starting with MySQL and later IBM DB2. It was hard not to notice that the dedicated DBAs I worked alongside were among the highest-paid professionals in the organizations I joined. Back then, DBAs held an almost exalted status within the tech industry, and the idea of dedicating 5–10 years to becoming a stone-cold expert in a single database type was incredibly appealing.
Ultimately, I didn’t pursue the DBA path. However, throughout my 20s and 30s, my career revolved around several niche database types like LDAP and X.500. It’s a space where I co-founded my first company, OctetString, which created a identity management focused database proxy, a company Oracle eventually acquired in 2005.
This background in databases ultimately has shaped my interest as a VC investing in companies innovating within the database space. One such investment was Tembo—a company I wrote about previously when we (Grand Ventures) invested in them. You can read my original post on that decision here.
Fast forward to last week, and Tembo announced dba, an autonomous AI agent for PostgreSQL databases. I was thrilled. Last year, when Ry Walker, Tembo’s founder and CEO, first introduced the concept of leveraging AI to handle tasks traditionally performed by DBAs, I immediately recognized it as a “killer app” where AI could truly shine.
The role of dedicated DBAs has been fading for over a decade as organizations have shifted from relying on one or two primary database types to managing environments with five to ten (or more) distinct databases. This complexity has diluted the need for hyper-specialized DBAs and contributed to the rise of DevOps engineers taking over many traditional DBA responsibilities.
Job listings for DBAs have been steadily declining over the years, mirroring this shift toward DevOps. The days when organizations invested heavily in “rock star” DBAs who were experts in databases like Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server are mostly long gone.
Tembo’s DBA AI agent is a natural evolution in this space—a tool that can streamline database management tasks across diverse systems without needing dedicated human specialists. Tembo dba will reshape the database landscape and redefine the art of the possible with AI-driven automation and remediation, and I am proud Grand Ventures is a part of it.
Over the past decade, the responsibility for database administration has increasingly shifted to developers. Despite databases being the backbone of modern applications, they often don’t receive the attention they deserve. Today’s software engineers spend most of their time focused on the application layer, while traditional DBA tasks—such as routine maintenance and monitoring—have been steadily automated. However, the use of AI for database administration has remained limited. Enter Tembo with dba.
Tembo’s dba is an autonomous AI agent designed to revolutionize database management for PostgreSQL. It autonomously identifies and resolves database performance issues in your codebase, going as far as writing code and submitting pull requests directly to your repository. By leveraging real-time database performance data, dba guides application changes to optimize efficiency.
This innovation addresses a critical gap in modern software development. As organizations adopt increasingly diverse and complex database environments, traditional DBA roles have diminished, with many responsibilities shifting to DevOps teams or developers themselves. Tembo’s dba is trailblazing a new era where AI seamlessly handles these tasks, empowering engineers to focus on building rather than maintaining.
Every inefficient database query, missing index, or unoptimized transaction adds friction, often felt by end users as slowness and/or lack of responsiveness within an application they are using. These inefficiencies compound into technical debt, dragging down performance and burning through compute resources which increases operational costs. By the time users feel the lag, a DevOps/engineering team is already in damage control mode.
Instead of playing whack-a-mole with database performance issues, Tembo’s dba uses AI to do the heavy lifting. dba monitors database performance, detects bottlenecks, and even creates pull requests (PRs) to fix them—freeing up software engineers to focus on writing great software, instead of managing databases.
The promise of Tembo dba is simple yet transformative: it’s like having a tireless, ultra-efficient database optimization engineer on your team—one who doesn’t sleep, doesn’t complain, and never lets issues slip through the cracks.
With dba, Tembo is at the forefront of shaping the future of database management. It’s multi-cloud, powered by AI, and designed to simplify life for developers and DevOps teams alike. If you’re interested in experiencing this innovation firsthand, you can join Tembo’s waitlist for early access.
If you’re working on a game-changing DevOps or developer tool—or exploring novel approaches in this space—we’d love to hear from you! Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected].
