For decades, databases have been managed manually through fixed compute and storage resources acquired for fixed periods and maintained by the datacenter staff. But in recent years, an alternative has arisen, which is to move database workloads to managed database services in the cloud. In this report, longtime IDC database analyst Carl Olofson examines the issues involved in manually managing databases in the datacenter contrasted with subscribing to managed cloud database services. It considers the benefits of moving to a managed cloud database service and provides actionable advice regarding how to proceed.