To those of you who started using scrum in your development teams: Did you maintain the traditional teams or form new ones? At our organization we are split into database, product development and frontend developers (simplified!).
I am interested in whether others actually reorganized their whole team structure due to scrum or if you formed dedicated project (?) teams combining e.g. one person of each "old" team.
I actually can't even imagine how scrum could work if you maintain your role silos. In scrum we build vertical slices through the product so that every feature delivered during a sprint requires all the skills you mentioned (plus QA which you did not). How would you create continuous collaboration and have people commit to the sprint if they weren't all on the same team? Seems like the most likely way to end in "Scrumfall" to me. I'm not an expert by any means but it seems to me that the sure way to fail at scrum is to think of it as a project management solution instead of an entire organizational change. Its cultural at the core.
To answer you question about "generalists". The easy answer is that by having certain people only able to work on certain things you create big fatty bottlenecks in getting to Done. With specialties you are always constrained at each step by having limited resources to work on something. In sprint 1 you may have a lot of db work to do where there is more than just that one dba can do. But then in sprint 5 where there is no change to the datamodel at all, your dba will be sitting around keeping bored. It becomes almost impossible in sprint planning to commit in a reasonable time if you have to divy up and assign at the task level by role instead of just grabbing the next set of priority features that fits your team's velocity. The generalist model will inevitably bring business value in the long run. You may just not see it right away until you achieve cross-pollination.
I would warn that if you are already in silo-ed groups by role, then you have to be very careful in am agile reorganization. Many people are not ready and don't want to be ready to lose their special titles and just become team members. I would think you should almost always expect some amount of turnover.